Festival review: Camille O’Sullivan’s Loveletter
Camille O’Sullivan’s Loveletter is an Irish toast to absent friends. Singers Sinead O’Connor and Shane MacGowan, along with David Bowie, are both mourned, and splendidly celebrated, in this mercurial musical tribute.
Arriving on stage in a flurry of waves, curtsies and glittery smiles, Camille O’Sullivan, from County Cork, surveys the audience at Her Majesty’s with a flustered exuberance. She moves straight into a snippet of ‘Summer in Siam’, a perky ditty by Pogues singer and composer, Shane MacGowan . After a few choruses it mashes-up into a more disturbed mood with Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’ (“I can feel death, can see its beady eyes.”)
And already we are presented with all the restorative contradictions of an Irish wake.
Immediately, O’Sullivan introduces her keyboard accompanist Feargal Murray. He is the calm behind the storm, she notes, prefiguring her own excitable improvisations and comic digressions. She turns to the three tall zany puppet props on the stage – two bemused cartoon cats and a bewildered dog, dressed in what might well be her costumes. She has decorated them with various trinkets. All drunken purchases, she says, that she made during COVID.
Dressed in a black, studded jacket, she spins around and bends over to show that the skirt no longer fits around the waist. “I don’t look like my poster” she observes wryly – and the audience warms to her even more.
O’Sullivan reminisces about Sinead O’Connor. That she was ahead of her time; that many young girls found a voice because of her. And Camille herself was one. Of MacGowan, who struggled with illness and addiction for much of his life, she recalls spending his last days with him and his family, before leading into a haunting rendition of one his most poignant songs, ‘Broad Majestic Shannon’– “Take my hand forget your fears, babe/there’s no pain, there’s no more sorrow” –
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“They were all gone, gone in a year,” she sighs. Of MacGowan’s funeral she recalls impishly, “The priests disapproved of us dancing near the coffin. But we had been so good for two hours.”
With Feargal Murray, O’Sullivan sings the duet ‘Haunted’, written in 1986 for the film Sid and Nancy, and re-released by MacGowan and O’Connor as a single in 1995. The lyrics carry heavier freight now: “I want to be haunted by your ghost/ By the ghost of your precious love.”
O’Sullivan’s vocal range and cabaret presence get a full workout with her highly theatrical rendering of Jacques Brel’s ‘Amsterdam’. Building from urgent whispers to a dervish-like increase in tempo and intensity, her voice roaring with rage and bitter despair, she collapses in a histrionic swoon. It is a show-stopping moment.
Nick Cave’s ‘Jubilee Street’ features some guitar feed and drum overdubs while the ever-versatile Murray moves from keyboard to trumpet. And to conclude the first set, O’Sullivan exchanges her gaffer-taped boots for spangled sandals and Kirstie McColl’s witty teaser, ‘In These Shoes’.
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With a costume change to red overalls (her electrician outfit she calls it) Camille O’Sullivan returns to O’Connor with a haunting unaccompanied reading of the heart-breaking classic, ‘My Darling Child’. It is worthy of Sinead herself. And, with heavy piano chords and back up vocals from the ever-watchful Feargal, she delivers ‘Take Me To The Church’ from O’Connor’s final album, I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss.
David Bowie’s death is another grief. She learned about his music from her older sister and sings the medley ‘Where Are We Now / Quicksand’ with a pleasing hint of Ziggy’s signature vocal inflection.
Drawing, seemingly randomly, from a range of material, O’Connor assembles a sequence that fits the mood she has created on the night, making the audience experience particular and unique. Her playful banter with the front rows, her zany chat and boundless energy, is endearingly eccentric . She jokes, confides, and even channels Mrs Doyle from Father Ted, but this mischief never detracts from the gravity and beauty of the music.
Sitting on the floor, as she likes to do, she switches to a short prose excerpt from James Joyce’s Dubliners story ‘The Dead’ and then, after a crowd singalong of Nick Cave’s ‘The Ship Song’, moves to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Anthem’ and rings the bells to let some different light in.
Finishing strongly in the final furlong with the McGowan masterpiece, ‘Rainy Night in Soho’ and the evergreen ‘Fairytale in New York’, O’Sullivan and Murray conclude with Billy Joel’s almost-mawkish ‘Lullaby’.
And then, immediately, Camille O’Sullivan is off the stage — speeding to the foyer to meet, greet and mingle with a crowd in no hurry to leave. It has been that sort of night.
Camille O’Sullivan’s Loveletter is playing one more night on March 5 at Her Majesty’s Theatre
Read more 2025 Adelaide Festival coverage here on InReview