Swansong

Swansong has returned for a short season at Theatre Works before the show heads off for a lengthy regional tour around Victoria, after its sell out seasons in the USA and Melbourne in 2018. Written by Irish Writer/film director Connor McDermottroe, it is directed by local director Greg Carrol.

This Irish monodrama is performed by Andre De Vanny, a magnificent award winning actor, who gives a powerful unrelenting performance of Oggi Byrne, the youthful, misguided, mentally unstable lumpenproletariat. Alone by a river bank feeding bread to an elegant swan he has named Agnes - swans mate for life he tells us - there is an unfulfilled gap in his life that he is trying to reconcile and mating has not been his calling card, nor has his life to normalcy.

He was stigmatized by his illegitimate birth; he is a voice of a generation of thuggish Catholics that fell through the cracks in the state of Ireland back in the sixties. But this is a universal story that is told with passion and fierce commitment by De Vanny, who is more than just convincingly real. He takes Oggi by the horns and delivers a magnificent character manifestation of a struggling young man abandoned by the system and forced to make amends with his own unfortunate circumstances.

I have little sympathy for a character that is a murdering misfit who only seeks redemption for the crimes he cannot confess to and hides behind a mask of optimism, claiming the world still owes him. But this is a great piece of theatre that is directed with fine articulate and nuanced precision by Carrol, who has cast De Vanny as the perfect Oggi Byrne.

Flora Georgiou