Fringe review: Paul McDermott – POEMS
Paul McDermott’s solo foray into publicly uncharted poetic waters pays off, with moments by turn hysterically funny, satirically whimsical, darkly fantastical, and movingly poignant. ★★★★
Paul McDermott has always walked and worked a productive line between an acerbic satirist and scorner of high cultural pretensions, and a consummate practitioner of moving, complex, technically proficient, and socially informed art.
That juxtaposition remains key to the former Doug Anthony All Star and Good News Week host’s engaged and affecting creative energy. Something of a Renaissance man or, as he describes it, a “scribbler” who has been “fighting tyranny, injustice and ennui for 40 years, armed only with comedy and a pretty voice,” this Fringe we are invited to witness McDermott presenting, for the first time, “recent works of rhyme.”
Here was indeed a relatively straightforward recital of poems, by turns humorous and despairing; visceral and melancholy, interspersed with McDermott’s characteristically agitated banter. Despite some misgivings, rhyme can indeed work to wonderful effect in poetry — but only when its comedic or satirical style matches the subject matter. The first poem, ‘On Cats’ certainly hit the spot — less Eliot’s ode to practical felines and more a Lovecraftian warning of the cosmic horror these scheming beasts are capable of, tricking human fools into keeping them as pets. A selection of McDermott’s visual artwork featured too, providing tonal variety and context for the formal verse. His dissonantly serious, lecturing descriptions of brilliantly mad images featuring cats wearing the skulls of human children or firing laser death beams from their eyes, among other absurdly monstrous acts, elicited some of the night’s most uncontrollably tear-inducing laughter.
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McDermott’s penchant for comically barbed audience confrontation was present and welcome but offset by seemingly genuine check-ins about how the whole thing was going, given its exploratory venturing into uncharted, perhaps vulnerable territory. His own promotional blurb notes with pointed irony that reading poetry aloud is “the most self-serving, shallow, egotistically vapid, puerile and purposeless of pursuits” while he noted from stage that this show was, in part, all about failure. But again, that instinct for juxtaposition was played to great structural effect. After reading a mantra-like piece about writing children’s books when you’re all washed up with nothing else to do, McDermott proceeded to read from that very effort — his well-received, melancholic but movingly poignant picture book Ghostbear, sadly now out of print. The long, last poem ‘Fluff’ about his experience of having those evocatively dark, moving words and images deemed at first not “fluffy” enough to publish for children, was an epic journey the audience gladly stayed overtime for.
Not everyone may find what they were expecting from McDermott at this gig, although there are plenty of the satirical gags, puns, pointed asides and other facets of his established persona to be found. But go with it and you’ll find a window into the wider variety of McDermott’s intricately varied artistic inclinations, well worth sharing for an hour (or so).
PAUL +1 (-1) presents POEMS is upstairs at Rhino Room until 1 March
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