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.