“Colm promised me the door wasn’t going to be a total shitshow,” observed Mike Amiri as we approached the entrance. Dillane duly delivered: unlike last season it was only a partial shitshow. Just like last season, however, this KidSuper show was held in a theater (the salubrious Odéon) and packed to the rafters with an audience inclined to goodwill.
Following last season’s excellent comedy show and last summer’s outstanding auction show, this time Dillane decided to put on a 25-minute play entitled How To Have An Idea. The general premise was that a creatively blocked Dillane (playing himself) reached such a cataclysmic impasse that he found himself crawling through his own ear hole (the sets were generally top-notch, if endearingly clunky). He travelled into his brain, where he was interrogated by various competing voices in his psyche (naturally, his mother was one of them). There were some funny moments, including a great Easter egg for fans of the great Eric Cantona, and it was clear that many creative calories were dedicated to the creation of a show which—like all of Dillane’s so far—dared to be different.
Unfortunately, however, this was to KidSuper what “Never Let Me Down” was to David Bowie: an uncharacteristically disappointing project from an excellent artist. As an expert in poor writing (I do it every night), my diagnosis is that Dillane lacked a decent editor (thank God I don’t). The gags fell flat, the philosophical stuff was clunky, the plotting was non-existent, and certain scenes—most especially the quiz show scene featuring Dillane in his underpants—served neither story, collection, nor audience. The actors alongside Dillane did their very best with the material. Especially game was Elizabeth Wautlet, who had to deliver a sentence so long it put the “die” into dialogue.
The brilliance of the auction show was that it showcased the clothes front and center through the conceit around which they were so ingeniously framed: plus it included a genuinely revelatory denouement. The comedy show lacked that elegantly innovative functionality between fashion and performance, but you forgave it because the night was so funny. Tonight’s KidSuper experiment neither showcased the collection (you could barely see it) nor had the compensatory upside of being highly entertaining in itself. It therefore fell flat. However Dillane will doubtless be back with something sparkier next season. And as the presence of certain big hitters from his former cameo at Louis Vuitton—not to mention his current gig with Meta—attested, KidSuper’s fans (including this one) intend to keep paying attention.
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