Dublin Oldschool

"I can see through my eyelids!" Rave Dave, one of the large cast of fucked-up characters who swagger through Dublin Oldschool, might have lost the plot: his eyes are wide open. But Emmet Kirwan's two-hander is a rave story that can see through both eyelids and skulls, shining a laser beam into the lives of a pair of k-holing brothers.

They're determined not to waste their youth, which means getting wasted as thoroughly and often as is humanly possible. Kirwan's story is soaked in the sweaty, messy Dublin rave scene. Jason (Kirwan) is a wannabe DJ who still feels invincible: his voice leads us on a three-day bender through flat parties, drug dealers' houses, field raves and blind alleys. His heroin-addicted older brother David (Ian Lloyd Anderson) can barely remember the buzz. Sleeping rough and hiding from his parents, he's a casualty from a party that ended a long time ago.

But when Kirwan and Lloyd Anderson's voices blend—in streams of rapped poetry, or hilarious rapid-fire banter—the bleakness feels miles away. Because there's a bit of joy in this story, too. It's full of faith in the power of pills and powders to warp time, to power benders, to transport you back to when parliament was pushing through 18th-century land reforms, or forward to the molten end of the universe.

And as their words finally give way to music, it feels ecstatic, a carefully-deferred rush of emotion. Kirwan's story might feel effortless, but it's been built with care – and underlaid with just enough pain to bring it crashing back down to earth.