All Over Town by Phillip McMahon, which finishes its run at the Project theatre tonight, is a thoroughly enjoyable one-man show. Billed oddly as a “mixed-media show” (does an offstage voice on a loudspeaker count?) this is a simple, lively, engaging account of a 20 year old Irish lad and his escape from the “shithole” of Ireland to travel the world, to reinvent himself, to lose himself in anonymity, to explore sex and to go a bit wild.

Played winningly by Andrew Macklin, whom I last saw shine in The Irish Curse, the central character Seán starts his journey in McDonalds in Dublin airport, with his much-loathed parents and brother. He is caustic, restless, and bitter: about them, about Ireland, about life itself, the bitterness of adolescent idealism. “Disappointment makes strangers of the ones you love” he says, ruefully. But, he’s starting a new life for himself; he’s young enough to believe the answers lie outside in the world.

Delivered in a fluid, natural, and energetic style, Seán addresses us directly, and takes us along with him on his journey with plenty of humour, a fine eye for the quirky detail, and a cutting charm. To his initial dismay, the very first guy he meets in Bangkok is Irish, a charismatic Dalkey character, Karl “with a K”, (“Finglas? Never heard of it”) who shows him the nightlife of “Bangers”. At the end of the first night, a very drunken Seán makes a clumsy play for him, which is rebutted, and the messy confusion of Seán’s unrequited love/lust for Karl serves to be the key relational dynamic of the piece.

Throughout the play, scornful references to the hokey trash parochialism of the Irish abound. Calling home, using Eircom Reverse Charges, he at first bristles at the operator’s (typically Irish) intrusive comments about how he should keep in touch with his Mammy; but when his Mammy turns out to be a woman not really interested in her son’s life, but more interested in the salacious fantasies that Psychics Online are selling her about him, it becomes apparent what fuels the massive chip on his shoulder. As a sweet counterpoint, the Eircom operator, Anne, to whom Seán keeps on getting through when making his calls, becomes one of his few confidantes, and he finds himself getting more comfort from her dotty encouraging chats than he does from his parents.

Broke, Seán finds himself staying with Karl in Sydney, and ends up working for him as an escort. When his first trick is blowing him, Seán weeps, looking out the window at a small boat on Sydney harbour; when he’s paid, the punter adds as an afterthought: “Oh, the vulnerability thing was a big turn-on”. He soon gets into it, in the experimental way that a lot of young lads do, enchanted at the prospect of making such “easy” money, and soon he’s heavily involved with the Sydney gay scene, drinking and drugging. His contempt for the other Irish lads there is telling, most memorably for the richly comic and (immediately familiar) barman Darren, a queen from Tallaght, and, most cruelly, when he pours scorn on a young Irish kid with glasses, straight off the plane, who gauchely approaches him saying that he recognised him from the George. Seán is on the run from who he used to be, heading for a fall. He becomes harder and colder, and more and more alone.

Karl’s Unique Selling Point as a pimp is that he has Irish escorts, as popular in Sydney for sex as Irish workmen were in London early last century; even the trannie Tallulah calls herself Siobhán to punters who ask for an Irish “girl”. She may be Brazilian, but as Karl says, if they believe that she’s a woman, “believing she’s Irish isn’t that much of a stretch”. In the end, his unrequited love for Karl becomes too much to bear when Karl shags the vile Darren, and Seán breaks away from Karl’s orbit, who takes revenge in a most unpleasant way. But this isn’t a clichéd “prostitutes always come to a bad end” story-line, there was something about the way it was written that avoided an overt moralism in favour of a subtler, more believable truth.

This is a play that makes no claims to being particularly deep, and yet is written with an authenticity that feels richly autobiographical; in particular the fecklessness and cruelty of youth are portrayed starkly and with humour. Is it a mere “gay play”? No, it’s a modern Irish play, full of a bristling suspicion about all things Irish. Coming out is not an issue, being gay is not the issue. This is a young man’s search for cultural and personal identity, relationship, and values; it’s a play about being a young Irish man.

Update: I reviewed the show with Peter Crawley of the Irish Times on The Kiosk with Nadine O’Regan on Phantom FM on 15th September.