Michael Keegan-Dolan, Nobodaddy Review ★★★★★

Nobodaddy was a character created by the visionary English Romantic poet William Blake, a character he intended as 'the father of jealousy', 'lover of war and slaughtering’. Blake, whose poem 'Auguries of Innocence', is read out on stage to bring Michael Keegan-Dolan’s work to an end, is one of its sources; another is 1975 murder of three band members commemorated in Paul Durcan’s poem 'The Miami Show Band Massacre' – that poem, too, read on stage midway through the 105 minutes performance.

Irish history, culture, religion and mythology all provide material for this episodic work, which Michael Keegan-Dolan’s company Teaċ Daṁsa brings to the stage at Sadler’s Wells with customary verve, all of it built around the central figure of folk musician Sam Amidon and his songs of death and loss.

Though the overall theme is death, Keegan-Dolan sees his Nobodaddy as a celebration of life and an ode to peacemakers; and indeed there is explosive life in many of the vignettes which make up the work.

Absurdist fragments bursting with disquieting energy occasionally - if rarely - give way to quiet, poignant interludes. One moment the irrepressible Rachel Poirier is running around the stage like a woman possessed, the next two men engage in a pleading dialogue cleverly built around the permutations of the simple sentence “I like you like you’.

At times the nine dancers and seven musicians wear bizarre masks, like painted balaclavas, some with outsize rabbits ears. The costumes vary between plain light grey suits and bright read tuxedos with black detail over ruffled white shirts, surely a reference to a band’s performing outfits.

They talk, run, fight, eat from a jam jar, pour milk over each other. More importantly, perhaps, they dance, and I would say that the most engaging sections of Noboddady are the ensemble dancing sequences. Drawing from Irish folk dancing, they evolve into something quite unique, with the dancers building them up to episodes akin to a collective trance.

I wished for more of those.

Memorable and theatrical as some sequences are, much of Nobodaddy defies attempts to engage and understand, and ultimately I’m not convinced the whole amounts more than the sum of its parts.