I’ve had way too many Oh Fuck moments than I care to remember – the innocent, fairly repairable ones likes spilling red wine at an aunt’s house and the heart in the mouth, oh-dear-fucking-god-what-have-I-done moments in work when you realised that there’s no turning back and you just have to face the music.
It’s refreshing then to meet some people who can share their own Oh Fuck moments and turn them around to make them feel like an affirmation of how wonderfully human you are, how you don’t subscribe to the belief that you’re always perfect and never mess up and how wonderful that is in itself as you have fully accepted your ability as a perfectly functioning human to fuck up every now and again.
The Oh Fuck Moment is just like yesterday’s ‘White Rabbit, Red Rabbit’ in that it is a welcome breath of fresh air. I went into Filmbase feeling a bit dreary and came out feeling great, rejoicing in the fact that I’ve made mistakes. It’s like a club really, the Oh Fuck club. We (i.e. I and my fellow audience members) shared our Oh Fuck moments and gave each other pats on the back for accepting our moments of ill-decision. Sitting around with cups of tea, we all laughed, sighed and gasped as tale after tale of ‘oh fuck’ moments were shared – some heart-breaking, some hysterical and others so unbearably relatable.
The Oh Fuck Moment isn’t comfortably labelled as theatre, I’d be quicker to describe it as a workshop of sorts, one that teaches you to deal with everything from the minor everyday fuck ups (spillages, slips of the tongue and such) to the major catastrophes such as totalling your car or telling your boss to fuck off. If you’re feeling the pressure to always deliver 100% without fault (who doesn’t feel that way?), then you’re due a visit to The Oh Fuck Moment – a relaxing piece of interactive performance with warm revelations about how you’re only normal if you fuck up every now and again – as James Joyce once said ‘a man’s errors are his portals of discovery’.
The Oh Fuck Moment plays in Filmbase until September 22. More info here >>
Beginning with a quick reveal of that day’s performer (in my case comedienne Maeve Higgins); the play moves pretty quickly with ‘the actor’ reading a script they see for the very first time when they step on the stage in front of the audience. The script weaves between insane yet meaningful tales and an explanation of the structure of the play from the playwright who ponders on to whom and where it is being performed today.
Far better than what the initial plan sounded like, this exploratory piece of theatre explores our everyday interpretation of all that happens around us, as well as our remembering or recreation of things past and imagination of things to come. The four actors become bloomalikes, wandering around Dublin city, sampling the food and getting into arguments about the burial of Paddy Dignam (four times over!).
Hopefully The Company will be back again soon with something different from what everyone else is doing – just like they did tonight.
