Dublin Fringe Festival 2026: Pretty Vacant (Helene Ott review)
Pretty Vacant written by Tom Swift, music by Daragh Dukes. Image Eoin Norton
****
In the part of the city known as the Liberties, just off High Street, tucked behind a limestone entrance is a rather unassuming, easily passable building. It does not dominate the area, but reassuringly blends into its fabric, existing quite happily as Tailors' Hall — the oldest surviving guild hall in Dublin. A landmark of revolution, and now home to The Performance Corporation’s current production of Pretty Vacant. "The play starts before you even go in the door." So remarked Tom Swift, the show's creator: "…we're hoping that when the audience arrives, even on the street outside Tailors' Hall, a bit of the play will already have begun." And certainly it has.
Historically recognised as Dublin's premier working-class district, the Liberties now exemplifies a familiar pattern in which commercial development places profit above the welfare of local residents. Here, councillors and communities continue to defend their right to shape the future of their neighbourhood. Deeply attuned to the idea that a place can be more than a source for a work — that it can become part of the work itself — the production sees Tailors' Hall, the Liberties, and its residents embodied by the audience and central characters.
At its heart is a seemingly perfunctory community meeting, convened by an indifferent private property developer. Led by the ex-Eurovision star functionary Carmilla, played madly by Ruth McGill, the meeting's "measured discussion" immediately escalates as it becomes clear that people are wary of redevelopments that simply mean gradual dispossession. Catwalking the stage in a shoulder-padded rhino-leather pantsuit, McGill establishes an atmosphere of unremitting dominance and faux bonhomie. Deliciously hyperbolising the greedy, borderline-megalomaniac persona of a property-shark girl boss, she is scarily ebullient, scarily blasé — full of vibrancy and repellent personality. Brilliantly directed by Jo Mangan, the meeting turns into a kind of grotesque cabaret of corporate doublespeak met with fed-up refusal à la Jonathan Larson, accentuated by Sinéad Lawlor's impeccably eccentric costume design.
The stage is modest, the props sparse, and the cast small. Yet the production creates a wealth of memorable set pieces: an entertaining nod to the titular punk anthem, brilliantly performed by Matthew Malone as a disillusioned and increasingly angry researcher; a revolutionary rap from Emmet Kirwan's Skippy McHugh, a wacky socialist TD turned reluctant moderate; and high-energy ensemble numbers, including a confrontation between a local culture-vulture artist (Camille Lucy Ross) and a struggling but imaginative resident (Aisling O'Mara). All unfold to Daragh Dukes' charmingly untidy score and Nanette Kincaid's choreography.
A seemingly cut-and-dried story about corporate capitalism despoiling a community, told through song, Swift's musical satire manages to turn a moment of profound collective sorrow into its opposite, laughing through the darkness, before pulling back from satire at the last moment to address social reality.
The Pretty Vacant project originally came to life after the team participated in Anthony Freeman O'Brien's In Our Shoes tour through the Liberties, which was so affecting that O'Brien was invited to join the play. Pulling back the curtain, O'Brien delivers a brilliant account of life in the Liberties, its residential hollowing-out, and the construction of two hotels threatening a cherished local space of remembrance and refuge: the Meath Street grotto.
This is not a musical that gives its community a happy ending. The developer is not toppled, the Liberties is not magically preserved, and the struggles of gentrification do not end when the lights go down. There are excellent songs and laughs, followed by the less comfortable thought that the real fight is waiting outside Tailors' Hall, where developers may be less cartoonish, but are no less real. What the play does offer is the pleasure of sharing, together, in the experience of it all.
Pretty Vacant, written by Tom Swift, music by Daragh Duke, runs as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2026 at Tailor's Hall until Sept 20.
For more information visit Dublin Fringe Festival
