Oona Doherty’s Specky Clark

Sadler’s Wells, London
May 10, 2025

Oonah Doherty’s latest work Specky Clark is inspired by her great great grandfather, who, at age 10, was sent to live with the Clark family in Belfast after his mother’s death. “Let me tell ya a story,” begins a male narrator, as subtitles are projected onto a screen high up above the stage.

Bellowing wails abruptly open the piece. Masked figures slip and slide around Faith Prendergast as the bespectacled and adorable Specky. An extended sequence follows in which Specky shivers in fits and starts under howling wind, a journey tense with fear.

Specky Clark unfolds mainly over the course of one night. Nonetheless the narrative takes convoluted turns and tangents; the fine lines of the Specky’s reality an ambiguous jumble of biography, dark Celtic mythology and other creative inspirations Doherty drew upon. The supernatural surfaces early and comically (the Clarks are in fact twins, fairies who fled their mother as mere new-borns) but lands later with the darker Samhain, a festival of ancient Celtic religion and the sinister precursor to Halloween.

A brief trio, slapstick in the silence of its rapid gestures, depicts rough interactions between youngsters on the street, a fight-dance scene that soon sees Specky broiling in the middle. This scene becomes a solo of explosive muscularity, stutters and stalls and an almost animalistic fury.

Doherty found inspiration in the paintings of Francis Bacon, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, muses that jump out of dialogue and the movement itself, best described in the programme notes, “There is a pink fleshy vulnerability to me, to dancing, there is a violent in me.” A butcher’s abattoir is the setting for the night in which Specky finds himself sliding between the world of the dead and the living. Clear plastic curtains shredded into strips fall upstage and the rest of the cast waft behind them in creepy shadows.

Prendergast achieves both sprightliness and awkwardness, especially in a second solo, accompanied by a synthesised David Holmes track. A pleasurable amalgamation sees Specky leaping one moment and doing the floss the next. He has rage but he also has style, and breaks free now that he is alone, even if alone means surrounded by slaughtered pigs.

Doherty’s genius is blending hilarity and mundanity with an off kilter atmosphere. Comedic gems, such as Mrs Doubtfire-esque characters or talking pigs, prompt audience sniggers even in the darkest moments. Billie Elliot is another significant influence for the work, but Specky’s urge to groove and the joy this conjures is tainted, effectively, by the sense that something awful is about to happen. It is this duality of innocence and impending menace, perpetuated by Lankum’s haunting vocals and scenes of stillness that feel almost symbolic, that sets an excitable yet unnerving tone.

The narrative becomes unhinged in the work’s climax. The cast unite in drunken yet tightly executed unison phases, each in their own wacky concoction of a Halloween outfit. They swing their heads with hands on thighs, stamp their feet and bounce as if under club lights. The ritual becomes a ballroom that moves in sinister lilts with pointed toes and proud chests. Red light makes the stage feel sunken. Are they purging, or performing? Either way, Specky, though at this point irretrievably immersed in his own groove, feels like the sacrificial lamb in a tale far darker than a relocation to Belfast. As explained between oinking by Gerard Headley in the role of purgatorial pig, Specky is the chosen one.

Specky Clark is is not the first dance piece of recent that has explored paganistic rites and circular patterns. The transportive, magical qualities inherent to Celtic mythology make for a visual and sensory treat and the piece ultimately leans into this atmosphere rather than any narrative or character development. However, dance is at its most affecting in these final scenes, chaotic, frivolous and dangerous in a way that can only be described as accurately human. Specky may have been destined for this dark, escapist ending all along, but we can’t say it is a bad ending, rather, movement sets him free.