Young local artistes under the leadership of David Finnigan have been hard at work to create a series of audio… audio things.
Things expressing that, for a generation growing up in the twilight of U2’s career, it’s hard to get what the excitement was all about.
Sometimes good people do bad things.
In 2010, David Finig obtained a copy of Eamon Dunphy’s UNFORGETTABLE FIRE: THE STORY OF U2 and was so consumed by fury that he was unable to laugh, think or truly know peace for many months thereafter. Reduced to functioning more or less as a machine that hates U2, Finig vented his vitriol by churning out pages and pages of an unperformable script – script with no characters, plot or action – a meditation, if you will – an experiment, perhaps, in what you can get away with. Interpolating huge gluts of found text and crowd-sourced commentary (via Facebook), as well as an entire subplot about the Cardinal Pell Award for students who excel in undergraduate Theology, Functioning As A Machine That Hates U2 is less a playscript than it is a critical mass of fever dreams circa autumn 2011.
Rather than letting this travesty sink like a stone into the depths of his hard drive, however, Finig contacted five very special young groups of theatre-makers. Dividing up the script (if you can call it that) into five parts, each group was given the task of performing it – somehow – as a radio play. The five sections, when completed, were returned and reassembled (by Nickamc’s magic hands) into a 12-part audio miniseries, available for free download. Free! (Yes, free – do you remember when that was a good thing? When you used to get excited at the thought of things being free?)
Warning, the language can be a little ripe.
[Photo by massygo CC BY]
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