Peadar de Burca’s entertaining exposé of the foibles of the male psyche, What Men Want, returns to the Town Hall main stage next week following a succesful national tour.
Written and performed by De Burca, What Men Want is part-play, part-stand-up-routine. Over the course of the show De Burca’s narrator – a bridegroom with a bad case of wedding day jitters- describes his chequered experiences with women, notably foxy heartbreaker Emma, and tries to make some kind of sense of them all. The show combines broad comedy and thoughtful observation in an amiable and briskly-paced entertainment that has delighted audiences all across the country.
“The touring has helped perfect the show,” De Burca observes. “You see what’s working and what isn’t, so I’ve been tighrening it up as I go along. It’s come a long way in the past few months and I think now it’s as good as I can make it.”
De Burca reflects on his experiencs with the show ‘on the road’; “The show gets a lot of people, mostly women, who just want to talk with you afterwards. While it doesn’t get many hecklers, I was in Dublin a month ago and two people in the audience took exception to a bit where I make jokes about Bank of Ireland and objected loudly to it. It turned out they worked in the bank! Another night, I was doing the show in Wexford, and there was a power failure in the arts centre so we all went across to the nearby pub to do the show there. On the spur of the moment I bought everyone in the audience a drink, then, at the end of the evening, I discovered that in doing so I’d over-spent the guarantee I had from the arts centre and I ended up having to pay them instead of them paying me!”
Perhaps such vagaries of the touring actor could form the basis of a future show, but in the meantime What Men Want’s comical dissection of the vagaries of male desire should once again prove a big hit with the Town Hall audience. The show is on the theatre’s main stage from August 20 to 22, at 8pm nightly.
