Vertiginous Loss, Love and Belonging on the National Stage

Abstract

When THISISPOPBABY opened its electro-pop musical Alice in Funderland on the main stage of the Abbey Theatre in April 2012, it seemed like Ireland’s vagrant queer performance culture had finally found a home in the national theatre. Since its founding by Jennifer Jennings and Phillip McMahon in Dublin in 2007, THISISPOPBABY has gained a reputation for creating projects dedicated to both recuperating and evolving queer performance in Ireland, but always brightening the margins rather than the main stage of the national theatre. Loosely structured around Lewis Carroll’s children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) — with book and lyrics by Phillip McMahon, and music by Raymond Scannell — this production followed Cork girl Alice’s journey through Dublin’s technicolour underbelly. But even though THISISPOPBABY appeared to have settled comfortably in the national theatre, here was a musical whose heartbeat pulsed to the pains and pleasures of being lost; of one girl’s search for home, rather than her arrival at a specific location, as such. Alice’s venture is routed around the reiterated questions: ‘Who am I?,’ ‘Where am I?,’ ‘Which way is home?’; appeals she connects throughout to feeling ‘very queer indeed.’¹

‘Which way is home?’

Alice, Alice in Funderland

‘What country, friends, is this?’

Viola, Twelfth Night