It Was Paradise, Unfortunately (Paradise) is disarmingly casual: ushered into a conference room off one side of the Goethe-Institut, you might well wonder if the friendly duo armed with an overhead projector are what you’ve come to see. Produced by The Collective, a Dublin-based interdisciplinary theatre group, Paradise promises to tell the story of playwright Raphael Khouri’s “investigation into the mystery of Dionysus”, the Ancient Greek god of wine, ecstasy – and theatre.
If Paradise doesn’t push at the boundaries of what a play can be, it certainly shrugs at them. The entire work is an autobiographical monologue by the charmingly earnest Khouri, with the occasional visual cue slide on screen by Myrto Stampoulou. The staging is sparse and the costuming – T-shirts reading “Fuck Aristotle” – is similarly lax. Childhood photos, family letters and screenshots of Tinder messages on an old phone tell us the story of Khouri’s life without it being performed to us.
“Theatre means transcendence of our bodies”
The central desires that run through his life, Khouri tells us, are synchronous. His desire to act, his love for the theatre, and his queerness are tied together. From his childhood in Jordan – a place characterised by its isolation – to his furtive adolescent self-discovery and escape to a new life in an accepting diaspora, they’ve always played the same role. Art and queer identity, his students learn, as handouts are passed around and excerpts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover are read to us, are intertwined with one another and always have been. Theatre means transcendence of our bodies.
It’s a performance that feels more like a TED Talk than Fleabag, eschewing dramatic tension in favour of an exploration of identity in the framework Khouri knows best – media analysis. A lecture centred on someone else’s life might sound dry, but it means that when Paradise takes a few tentative steps towards conventional theatrical staging, the effect is all the more electrifying. At one high point, Stampoulou hands out cardboard masks and we’re invited to imagine the Dionysia of Ancient Greece: festivals in honour of the wine god, where ecstatic, risqué parades culminated in dramatic performances. As the lights dim and low electronic music starts to pulse, you could almost believe you were part of that rapt audience at the very first theatre festival.
“Just like in real life, a satisfying “answer” doesn’t present itself”
It was hard to buy into the idea that theatre has been stripped of its queerness while attending Dublin Fringe, perhaps the most unapologetically queer space in Ireland outside of Pride itself. Khouri’s attempts to tie everything together and assign a greater meaning are just that, attempts – and just like in real life, a satisfying “answer” doesn’t present itself. But it’s the loose ends in his story – the career anxiety, the dreams crushed by Covid-19 – that make it lovable.
