A friend gave me a ticket to see Dylan Moran at the Canberra Theatre last night. That lead to a faux pas in the foyer when I looked up over my champagne and asked “So… who are we seeing tonight?”. There was a collective drawing in of breath across a large radius.
So there was a full house of serious Dylan Moran fans, almost all of whom would have expressed their disdain for commercial television if given half a chance. A great number of them gave every sign of not getting out much. But they came to see a man who does get out quite a lot talk about it at length.
There were signs all over the Canberra Theatre (still lacking carpet after the floods, how long does it take??) warning that Dylan Moran was going to smoke on stage. Exactly how many people would see the sign and go home remains unknown, but there didn’t seem to be any empty seats when he started out.
Wreathed in smoke and expertly sucking on his cigarette while drinking red wine with the same hand he proceeded to devote a huge chunk of his show into bagging out Canberra, and Canberrans, despite admitting that he’d spent no time getting to know the city at all. The interesting thing is the audience loved it.
“Beat us”, “beat us more” they seemed to cry. Proving Moran’s point that most of all we want to be noticed for anything at all. All this mocking of our hick nature came from an Irishman who lives in Scotland, not exactly the gleaming centres of the world either.
Before the Moranistas drown me out I have to say I enjoyed the show once he got the Canberra bashing out of his system. While mostly it gave the impression of being an impromptu drunken rant, it was a very funny impromptu drunken rant with some interesting insights along the way.
After the show maybe 15 of the packed house made their way to the Phoenix, Dylan would have been very disappointed by the rest of you. If he cared at all, he’s playing in Tasmania tonight.
UPDATED: NowUC’s Peta Compton really liked it.
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