The Irish Literary Times

Billy Roche’s The Cavalcaders was first staged in Dublin in 1993, and is a play conceived from the playwright’s boyhood memories of a local shoemaker’s shop, a handful of songs he composed on a piano that was saved from a fire, his brother’s imagined showband, and the effect of three books he was reading at the time, including T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. With such an assortment of influences, it is no surprise that The Cavalcaders is teeming with endless twists and turns, and characters that harbour limitless levels of emotional turbulence beneath their seemingly mundane lives: a hairdresser, a shoe-maker and a shopkeeper. Decadent Theatre Company handles this composite play extremely well, unravelling the knots of the intricate plot with balanced but generous expression and intelligent discernment. On the twentieth anniversary of its first performance, this riskily elaborate play is produced in a fresh, bold and tidy fashion.