Alternative take

Published on Wednesday 20 August 2008 22:46

THOMAS L MUINZER, assistant producer of Hippos in the Shower, counters a reviewer's remarks

I DO not write here to take umbrage at Kate Copstick's generally negative assessment of musical comedy Hippos in the Shower (Festival Review, 7 August); rather, I and many other Belfastians who read her brief remarks were unsettled by her more sweeping social comments: "Decades of The Troubles gave us Behan and O'Casey. A few years of peace cough up this. Makes you revisit the role of trauma in great art."

The Hippos audience is presented with love and heartache, adventure and other humane and somewhat universal themes that will take the place of the guns, baseball bats and balaclavas that more usually populate Belfast writing. I can certainly respect aesthetic criticism of the show, but the general attitude above is a misguided, dare I say ignorant, view. If Ms Copstick wishes to enjoy this kind of artistic work, I can recommend pretty much every damn thing that comes out of modern Northern Ireland, aside from the handful of shows, including Hippos, that are trying to enrich the canon by doing something new.

Ms Copstick is content to reference Brendan Behan and Sean O'Casey, both committed republican activists and both fine Irish writers, but in our current context we might do better to listen to one of Ireland's equally influential pacifist literary voices: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." (Oscar Wilde.)