REVIEW: Magic by Hugo Lau at Lion & Unicorn Theatre 12 – 16 March

'Writer and director Hugo Lau has a sharp ear for dialogue, and allows his characters to sound real' ★★★ ½

“Are you ok?”

“No love.”

“This sucks.”

Natalie stumbles home after partying to find her mum waiting for her in the living room—not to tell her off, but to let her know that her brother just died. Drowned in the canal. Natalie runs to throw up in the pre-set toilet: Grief or alcohol? Who knows. Will she help her mum break the news to her little sister Julia in the morning? Yes yes of course. And with that Natalie vanishes on a multi-week bender, trying desperately to drown all thoughts and feelings in gin, sex and more gin. 

Though billed by new company Beau Beau Theatre as “an Irish story about grief,” Magic is a universally relatable play about making terrible choices to avoid facing the unthinkable.

Writer and director Hugo Lau has a sharp ear for dialogue, and allows his characters to sound real, sympathetic and fucked-up alike. He has also side-stepped what could have been easy plot points about people taking advantage of the vulnerable main character: Yes, Natalie gets wasted and sleeps with people she probably shouldn’t, but those people are three-dimensional and mostly well-intentioned. Laoise Fleming gives a particularly strong performance as the woman who falls for Natalie at a party and slowly realises that she’s only a means to an end. It’s Natalie who hurts those around her, and full credit must go to Honi Cooke, who doesn’t flinch back from her character’s worst actions but so clearly grounds herself in grief that she never loses the audience’s emotional investment.

The story is staged with a playful simplicity that pays off with varying levels of effectiveness. A church pew serves as couch, bed, bench alike; everyone wears a name-tag; and props rarely look like what you’d expect. Personally, I’d love to see more shows subsitute lollipops and candy sticks for cigarettes and rollies. The decision to mark each transition on a white board and rotate most actors in for only one or two scenes, however, means that Magic sometimes feels a bit like a long collection of scene studies. The majority of the (excellent) cast spend their time watching the proceedings from a line of chairs against the back wall, but their presence is rarely put to use. There’s unexplored potential in these silent observers, particularly the dead Lowell and Natalie’s grieving family (including Ciara Pouncett’s shattered mother, who shines in every scene she’s granted).

Beau Beau Theatre has brought together a strong group of artists across the board, and it will be interesting to see if they continue to mesh and play and push the form of their storytelling further. But this is a warm and touching first outing.

Photography by Jake Bush

Writer & Director: Hugo Lau

Producer/Welfare Lead: Harriet Bevan

Producer/Choreographer: Dulce Fraser

Cast

Aoibhinn: Georgia McKnight

April: Laoise Fleming

Fiadh: Ciara Pouncett

Julia: Micáela Gorman

Lowell: Hugo Lau

Mehdi: Michael Joel Bartelle

Natalie: Honi Cooke

Rae: Daniel Keogh

Thursday: Léna Laprès

Reviewer: Anna Clart