Three Dublin shows tackle faith, art, and exile — SkimNews
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- Lourdes! The Musical (★★★★☆) by Xnthony Ltd follows singer-songwriter Matthew (played by Riain Cash), diagnosed with HIV in 2008, who joins a parish drama group taking a musical about Saint Bernadette to the French pilgrimage town, with music by Matthew Floyd Jones blending pop, club beats, and soulful ballads.
- Heroes of Tomorrow (★★★☆☆) from Brokentalkers, joined by British artist Andy Smith, examines art and activism through a fictional Norwegian conceptual artist called Jan Hansen whose latest work "The End of It All" has been commissioned by three global tech companies.
- In the Heroes of Tomorrow staging, actors poke their heads through slashed canvases and press black hand imprints onto a pristine gallery wall, prompting the reviewer to call the result "clever and knowing but, for Brokentalkers, surprisingly tentative."
- Zinc (★★★★☆) from Dead Centre dramatizes the history of Neutral Moresnet, a forgotten mini-state on the Germany-Belgium-Netherlands border, adapted from Belgian political philosopher David Van Reybrouck's book and tracking the life of Joseph Rixen, born there in 1903.
- The Zinc ensemble — Julie Mughunda, Timmy Creed, Fabio Godinho, Cathy Min Jung, and Mila Moinzadeh — delivers a multilingual production integrating video mapping, projection, and layered sound design, connecting Neutral Moresnet's fate to colonisation, exile, and the utopian project of Esperanto.
- Across the three productions, the festival programme tackles heavy themes of racism, conflict, and prejudice through pilgrimage, conceptual art, and multilingual historical drama, with Dead Centre's Zinc singled out as "one of the company's most ambitious works to date."
Why it matters: Three independent companies — Xnthony Ltd, Brokentalkers, and Dead Centre — scored four, three, and four stars across the Dublin festival, using pilgrimage, gallery conceptualism, and the lost history of Neutral Moresnet as vehicles for questions about corporate art funding, displacement, and the politics of neutrality.
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