Seven Drunken Nights: the Story of the Dubliners – New Wimbledon Theatre, London

Director: Ged Graham

Musical Director: Adam Evans

Seven Drunken Nights: the Story of The Dubliners, playing for one night at New Wimbledon Theatre before touring, is a tribute show. But it’s not a tribute show along the lines of, say, ones that celebrate ABBA, with performers impersonating individual band members – an impossibility given the band’s 50 years of music-making. Rather, it’s a celebration of the Dubliners’ folk-based music with a light sketching in of the events of their glory years.

But the promotional material for the show admits it’s ‘not affiliated or endorsed by The Dubliners or Mr John Sheahan’. One might imagine this might put a damper on the enterprise, John Sheahan being the last surviving member of the band’s definitive lineup and until recently planning a come-back tour, The Dubliners Encore. But in any case, the enthusiastism of the audience in Wimbledon suggest they’re more than happy with the ersatz group.

The story of The Dubliners is an extraordinary one. The band formed in 1962 in a Dublin pub, O’Donoghue’s, originally as ‘The Ronnie Drew Ballad group’ after founding member, Ronnie Drew. The name change came about because another member, Luke Kelly, was reading James Joyce’s Dubliners at the time. With key members Kelly, Barney McKenna, Jim McCann, Ciaran Bourke and John Sheahan, The Dubliners would go on to flourish at home and abroad, despite the loss of band members along the way, until 2012 when it finally disbanded.

Seven Drunken Nights uses the idea that we’re all meeting in that pub to hear the band and enjoy some craic. Lead singer and narrator Ged Graham, who is also producer and director of the show, takes us through the outline of the band’s rapid evolution and introduces most of the songs. All the old favourites are there: Raglan Road, The Irish Rover, The Wild Rover, Dirty Old Town and Whiskey in the Jar.  The distinctive sound world is created by two guitars, two banjos and the occasional tin whistle.

One of the drawbacks of the show, however, is the fact that the singers are all miked up and the music amplified to such a high degree that it’s very hard to hear any of the lyrics. And that’s a pity, given the band’s origins lie in folk ballads where storytelling plays a key part. Take for instance the eponymous Seven Drunken Nights. The narrator returns home each night ‘as drunk as drunk could be’ and there follows a litany of what he finds, and his wife’s ever-more-outrageous justifications. So she claims ‘two boots beneath the bed where my old boots should be’, that they’re just ‘two lovely geranium pots me mother sent to me’. Most of the audience clearly know the song well, but it seems a pity not to highlight the comic lyrics which simply get lost.

Most of the songs chosen are boisterously upbeat or richly sentimental paeans to Ireland.There’s not much here about Irish politics; and women, in this selection at least, are either objects of undying love, or nagging wives. But this makes the occasional performance of a sadder, more thoughtful songs, like The Rare Ould Times and The Town I Love So Well  all the more poignant. There’s cluster of such songs when the show briefly moves to the issue of change and death, with a particularly moving scene suggesting the great loss Ireland felt when Bobby Lynch and Luke Kelly both died in their 40s. Drew himself made it to his 70s, despite his smoking which left his voice, in the words of one commentator, ‘like the sound of coke being crushed under a door’.

But it’s disappointing we don’t hear any of the Irish-language songs championed by Ciarán Bourke, of any other instruments than the guitar, banjo and tin whistle. Notable amongst the 13-strong team of instrumentalists and singers (from whom seven perform in each show) is fiddle player Fred Holden.  A bit of  bodrhán wouldn’t have come amiss, though.

Reviewed on 7 April 2026 then continues to tour