For those of you that spend lunch times eating stale, over-priced sandwiches and listening to classmates’ tales of romantic woe and alcoholic excess this article will change your life – or at least an hour of it.

The Bewleys Café Theatre has become as much of an institution as the coffee itself.  Located in what used to be the Oriental Room, this intimate venue is an escape from the humdrum of the café and the crowds of Grafton Street.  Fairy lights adorn the beams and thick velvet curtains block out any guilt you may feel at not pursuing mundane, practical activities during the hours of daylight.  The atmosphere is one of shabby luxury, a left-bank café style; the sort of place where you might fall in love with a poet, be inspired to write the first chapter of your third novel or decide to leave Dublin for a life of decadence and debauchery in Paris… As I drifted on flights of fantasy the sniff of soup and soda bread brought me back to reality.  This light, tasty and undeniably Irish lunch is included in the price of the ticket.  Not quite the same as a glass of red wine and moules frites but it certainly keeps you going for the rest of the day.

The play that I almost forgot I was going to see was ‘The Friends of Jack Kairo’, a one-man show written and acted by the incredible Simon Toal.  This guy is no student being given his big-break.  Toal is a consummate professional.  He has toured Edinburgh and Prague and was invited to perform at the International Theatre Festival in Romania, where he received a standing ovation from a packed house.  He was nominated Best Male Actor at the Dublin Fringe, nominated Best Writer by The List in Edinburgh and Best Actor by the Herald in Dublin.  Not only is he phenomenally talented, both as a writer and an actor, but he has a secret supply of energy.  The script could only have been comfortably played by somebody who wouldn’t be let out: it demands hyperactivity, a schizophrenic turn of phrase and multiple personalities.  Oh, and a knowledge of dance moves from samba to swing and everything in between – including Morris dancing!  Toal pulls it off with style by temporary insanity and extraordinarily malleable features that can transform from alcoholic reverie to coy female cunning in a fraction of a second.

Taking its tone from 1940s Film Noir ‘The Friends of Jack Kairo’ combines surreal pastiche and clumsy political satire – think ‘The Maltese Falcon’ meets Monty Python. Film Noir is a notional subgenre of crime films of the ’40s and ’50s so christened by critics rather than filmmakers, the visual vocabulary and stock characters of film noir have become an instantly recognisable part of the world of cinema. Directors seem uncommonly hung up on film noir; references to it range from nods in the films of David Lynch and the Coen Brothers to adoring homage such as ‘Sin City’, ‘The Good German’ and parodies like Steve Martin’s ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’. Its prevailing moods; loneliness, paranoia and a sense of widespread political and moral corruption seem particularly apposite to our own times, which may be why Simon Toal has chosen to spoof it in particular for his tongue-in-cheek satire.

So you want to know more about the dancing?  I’ll get there…  Toal’s creation of hard-drinking low-life and work-dodging private eye Jack Kairo is an enthusiastic homage to the hardboiled creations of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler (the villain of Dashiell Hammett’s 40s thriller ‘The Maltese Falcon’ is called Joel Cairo – to say that Hammett is merely an influence is an understatement!).  Toal’s Kairo is called to duty when ex-squeeze (I think that’s 50s rather than 40s slang but it’s the best I can do), femme fatale and perpetually pirouetting Elizabeth Rumsfeld asks him to solve the murder of her uncle General Rumsfeld and recover a supremely powerful cold-fusion device.  This is as much detail as I gathered concerning the ‘plot’.  The dialogue was deliberately speeded-up for comic effect and this, combined with the utterly bizarre sequence of events, meant that any logical sequence there may have been was lost or at least besides the point.  The play became a series of set-pieces, each one a (thoroughly deserved) showcase for Toal’s talent.

The characters and caricatures Toal pulls out of his prop-wardrobe to solve the murder include Dick Cheney who stars as the devil butler, Donald Rumsfeld as Dr Evil and Hans Blix as a power hungry psychopath.  Was there meant to be a subversively clever and complex analogy with the Iraq war?  If so it was lost on me.  The only benefit an analogy with the ex-government of the United States conferred on the play was some funny voices and funny voices are well, just funny whomever they are attributed to.  The funniest aspects of the play were those in which Toal had clearly let his wonderfully weird and unique imagination run riot.  The interrogation and confession of Freddy the Flea, a real flea that Kairo traps in a Bourbon glass, is comic genius – the flea that is, not Toal.  The astonishing power, moving sincerity and incredible range of Freddy’s performance is breathtaking.  Not only is Freddy hilarious but he is the only character that shows genuine remorse for his part in the murder of General Rumsfeld.  Toal does morality too: sometimes the smallest bodies hold the biggest hearts.  The life and death of Freddy the Flea is surely a lesson for our times.

‘The Friends of Jack Kairo’ runs until 14^th February.  Doors open at 12:50 and the performance starts at 13:10.  Don’t miss out, it’s a treat.