My son’s friend John, who is Irish, said that there’s always some­thing sexu­al in Irish dan­cing (he prob­ably just calls it “dan­cing”). Malo explained this to me when I expressed sur­prise that all the women Irish dan­cers in Lord of the Dance – Dan­ger­ous Games had stripped off their pretty tra­di­tion­al out­fits to bras and tights. Later in the show the boys got their shirts off too, which felt like it evened things out a bit.

Lord of the Dance

Lord of the Dance is a frenzy of a show. From dan­cing robots to vir­gin­al dam­sels to sort of 90s urb­an youth (camo pants! Vests with no shirts!), with live duelling viol­ins and a sing­er with the spir­it of Celine Dion, it is quite the romp. Loosely themed around the story of The Lord of the Dance in a battle with a bad dude, it provided an oppor­tun­ity for lots of dance offs and and dingy hell scenes and pretty mead­ow scenes and scenes I’m assured by Malo are lif­ted straight from War­ham­mer. There was a nod to NZ when the baddy star­ted doing a haka. It was com­plex.

In all hon­esty I’m not much of an expert at the Irish dan­cing genre (apart from the odd hil­ari­ous foot kick when Dirty Old Town plays), and much of the dan­cing looked kind of the same with dif­fer­ent light­ing and cos­tumes. The crowd was lov­ing it though, and the older Irish dude next to me was whoop­ing it up in a very charm­ing fash­ion. It was a full house and I daresay if you have an interest in Irish dance you’ll be there with meta­phor­ic­al bells on. Pos­sibly lit­er­al.

If this sounds like your thing Lord of the Dance – Dan­ger­ous Games plays at the St James until the 30th August.