In 1969, at the end of a decade marked by counterculture, rock music and bloodshed, John Lennon and Yoko Ono invited the world’s attention to their honeymoon suite in order to achieve world peace. Historians will recall that they were unsuccessful, pointing to such assaults against global stability as uninterrupted genocides, invasions, terror attacks and Yoko Ono. Such is our confused inheritance of ideals, hopes and cynicism, and the only coherent way I can explain why, eight hours into Waterdonkey’s 12-hour improvisational performance, I am belting out a karaoke version of Depeche Mode with someone I don’t know, in a bathroom, in Spanish.


The scene is somewhere between Bed-In and bedlam; a Warholian tea party (audience members, five at a time, are offered nothing stronger). A sweetly sincere young woman, Rose Sweeney, trades intimate recollections with us individually on a sofa. In a room thick with detritus, the edgy wit John Rogers plays a version of Truth or Dare with the fearless Oisín (just Oisín), Zita Monahan (sharp as a tack, bright as a button) and any audience member game enough to express “peace” through mime. For one freewheeling, gradually transportative hour, it’s all pretty far out, man.


Whatever the placards say, peace is not the real agenda; but nor, thankfully, is postmodern pastiche. Rogers’s seemingly off-the-cuff response to the question, “Do you believe in God and why?” searches through the logic of music, football and wherever people come together, to exalt the transcendental powers of genuine connection. We leave with the firm suspicion that we have made one.

Peter Crawley