By Grey O’Brien

On our last Young Critics trip to Cork, we went to see the surrealist, immersive, one man show called Scattered Sideways, written and performed by Will Flanagan. The show was confusing, dream-like, and as the name suggests, scattered feeling, in the most bizarrely effective way possible. I personally found it to be brilliant in its concept and execution alike. It managed to do an incredible amount of storytelling and character development, all with amazing messaging, in the hour we spent watching it.

The show, a mix of physical theatre, circus, poetry and film all in one, took us along a winding, confusing, yet interactive and engaging journey. While talking about it, it can be split into two main parts. The story, and the performance. Throughout the show, Will Flanagan inserted pieces of a story between the various scenes of poetry, circus performance and theatre. This story followed a goldfish, trapped in a tiny fishbowl, floating through a seemingly endless sea of polluted, murky water. It was told like a children’s fairytale, and chronicled the lonely life of the goldfish as he watched the world outside of his clean, safe fishbowl. The show was interrupted every few minutes to continue the story, which I thought broke it up in an effective manner. Without it, the moments of high strung tension would not have felt as important as they were with the slow, childlike story to bring the intensity to a halt between scenes.

The other side of the metaphorical coin was the performance aspect. We watched Will Flanagan as he executed a dozen performances, each one more intense and draining than the last. These included walking a tightrope, juggling and balancing towers of skittles on himself and on each other, a gorgeous light show, a spoken word poetry act, and much more. We followed the character as he desperately tried to impress his audience, us viewers, with bigger and more intense tricks and performances, while he battled to hold their attention. Throughout the show, projected, fast paced clips, intriguing sets and frantic sounds and noise all served to capture our gaze, while Will Flanagan’s character tried desperately to outshine it all and bring the attention back on to himself.

Each act served a different purpose and represented the different aspects of the struggle his character was experiencing while trying to keep up with the quick moving sensory nightmare of the world he was in. His acting was mostly physical, yet, without needing words he expressed impressive amounts of emotion through physical theatre and body language. At times it was hard to believe he wasn’t talking at all. It was so well done, it felt like I was getting a look inside the deepest, most vulnerable part of the characters soul, all without a single word being spoken.

Grey O’Brien is a member of WACT Youth Theatre in Co. Wexford and is a Young Critic for 2025