Hot Tickets – Frank McNally on watching a steamy Molière and how Barry Lyndon became a TikTok hit

Irish Times

23-07-2025

Went to Molière's A Misanthrope in Smock Alley at the weekend, and it's every bit as good as
our reviewer said
. But my God, the heat.
Just returned from sweltering Spain, I was sorry I hadn't bought one of those souvenir fans in Alicante airport. As it was, like most of the audience, my companion and I had to improvise one, from several pages of the Dublin Fringe Festival programme.
Rebuilt in 1735, the venerable theatre may be struggling with climate change on the Costa del Irlanda. 'These are the joys of a 300-year-old building,' said a sympathetic staff member at the interval, as sweaty audience members poured out on to the front steps for air. But it was the cast we felt sorry for.
As well as being a brilliantly funny update of Molière's 1666 farce, transferring the plot to a Silicon Docks tech company, the production is a fiercely energetic one. It includes, for example, a choreographed sex scene that for technical difficulty (9.9) and artistic merit (10.0) would rival any gymnastics routine.
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That probably added to the heat, in fact. And there was an actual gym scene too. But whatever about the audience, the actors somehow seemed to keep their cool.
Molière himself would have struggled with the conditions. When comedians talk of 'dying' on stage, that's usually just a metaphor for having a bad night. He did it in the literal sense, near enough, while acting in one of his own plays. After years of suffering from tuberculosis, probably contracted from a time he spent in debtors' prison, he had a fatal coughing fit mid-scene and expired a few hours later.
[
A Misanthrope: knockout satire of a horny and insincere Silicon Docks
Opens in new window
]
In a twist he could hardly have written himself, the play in question was called The Imaginary Invalid, and his part was that of the eponymous hypochondriac. Which reminds me of Spike Milligan's epitaph. A martyr to comedy, Molière was probably more deserving of the last words: 'I told you I was sick.'
Anyway, the great Irish heatwave has broken since the night I was in Smock Alley. And A Misanthrope is highly recommended, regardless of the weather. But any steaminess in the venue now should arise only from the play.
I'm intrigued to learn that the 50th anniversary re-release of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, now showing at the Irish Film Institute and elsewhere, has also become one of the surprise hits of the summer: embraced, ironically or otherwise, by the TikTok generation.
A period drama following the adventures of an 18th-century Irish rogue, it was considered slow-moving even in 1975. The New Yorker's movie critic Pauline Kael called it 'a three-hour slide show for art history majors'. But now it's being hailed as a masterpiece even by members of Generation Z, a cohort often depicted as having the attention spans of goldfish.
Mind you, according to the Financial Times, some of the new fans 'have taken to TikTok to express their love for the film in their lingua franca: viral 'fancam' edits cut to violently themed rap music'. So whether they can sit still through the full three hours and seven minutes of scenes that look like old paintings may remain debatable.
As at least some art history majors will know, the original 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray may have owned something to the vagaries of an Irish summer. During a tour of Ireland a year earlier, Thackeray had endured two days of unrelenting rain in Galway, for which umbrellas were no match. But marooned in Kilroy's Hotel, he caught up on his reading, and especially on a handful of popular 'chapbooks' he had bought for eightpence in Ennis.
These included the memoirs of one 'Captain Freeny', a gentleman robber from 18th-century Kilkenny, whose unshakeable self-confidence, freedom from conventional morality and the 'utter unconsciousness that he is narrating anything wonderful' could be a description of Lyndon. Either way, slightly disguised as 'Feeney', the highwayman also earned a cameo in his own right, in both book and film.
Alas, not all the comedy of the novel made it on to the screen. The mid-Atlantic accent of Ryan O'Neal was much criticised in these parts when the movie came out. But reading the novel a while back, I was amused to see that one of its running jokes involves the narrator lampooning the way English people speak.
Take the scene, for example, where Lyndon – pursuing a titled lady – needs to buy the loyalty of her doorman. 'But listen, you are an Englishman?' he asks the latter. ''That I am,' said the fellow, with an air of the utmost superiority. 'Your honour could tell that by my haccent.''
There follows, almost as an aside, an insult on the relative morality of the two neighbouring countries. 'I knew he was [English] and might therefore offer him a bribe,' Lyndon explains for the benefit of any foreign readers, and adds: 'An Irish family servant in rags, and though his wages were never paid, would probably fling the money in your face.'