Marina & The Diamonds

Marina & The Diamonds
The Olympia Theatre, Dublin

A vintage RCA television set, a martini glass, a velour chaise longue, a cuddly toy, a pair of novelty sunglasses, a chiffon nightgown… it may sound like the conveyer belt bounty from a lost episode of The Generation Game – minus the quivering bloke, naturally – but it’s actually the fiendishly kitsch collection of props that awaits art-pop dream Marina Diamandis on stage at the Olympia Theatre.
Things get even more surreal when a neon sign buzzes fuchsia with the words Electra Heart, and the painfully pretty frontwoman appears, clad in a simple, black two-piece, crowned with a wedding veil I reckon she picked up at Euro 2 on George’s St. Of course, anyone who’s heard the sizzling soap opera that is Electra Heart will have been expecting her to bring the melodrama.
The song is ‘Homewrecker’, a hooktastic electro pop stomper that finds its unscrupulous narrator declaring, “I break a million hearts just for fun”. Beginning with a solemn, almost creepy monologue about failed romance, Diamandis soon kicks things into high gear with some expertly theatrical shape-throwing and that devastating falsetto of hers.
It’s one of many personas Marina will adopt over the course of tonight’s 80-minute show, alongside the bitchy beauty queen, the bored housewife, and the troubled teen, all of which she plays with peerless conviction.
Still, you have to wonder how much of this delicious bubblegum irony Marina’s younger fans are getting, particularly with cheeky visual nods, like a specially-made sash bearing the title Miss Shellfish Beach, playing a big part in the show. For all their ecstatic squealing, a small percentage of her fans probably just think she’s a cute singer who wears pastels a lot.
The Welsh beauty’s 100-date tour is a remarkably frugal affair; where Madonna drafts in John Paul Gaultier as head seamstress, our affable host has clearly called upon her local hen-night stockists; where Katy Perry shoots confetti from her boobs, Diamandis must manually tip a popcorn box of glitter over the audience, only reaching the first couple of feet.
Of course, when you’re as adorable and dynamic a performer as Marina, money doesn’t matter so much. Whether swooning at the keyboard on the deceptively dark ‘Teen Idle’, or brandishing a fabric burger on signature song ‘Hollywood’, she knows the limits of her wonderfully odd voice and even better, she’s happy to play with them.
Diamandis has always been remarkably candid about her career ambitions, and her frustration at not being more famous. “For someone who wants to be one of the best artists of her generation,” she recently said, “I’ve done fuck-all.” Based on tonight’s performance, she’s closer than she realises.
Celina Murphy
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