The Colleen Bawn

Project Arts Centre

You always want what you can’t have. That’s the psychology at work in Dion Boucicault’s enjoyably overheated melodrama of 1860, in which Hardress Cregan (Ian Lloyd Anderson), a morally and financially bankrupt Anglo-Irish gentleman, is secretly married to an Irish peasant beauty (Liz Fitzgibbon) whose language and custom bring him only shame.

Something similar is at work in this co-production between Bedrock, Civic Theatre and Project Arts Centre, which finds itself helplessly attracted to the emotional heights, daft plot developments, Irish caricatures and audience appeal of Boucicault’s melodrama, but which recognises a potboiler as a guilty pleasure.

Both the characters and the production face the same challenge then: to find a way to legitimise their desires.

Director Jimmy Fay’s solution is to emphasise the artificiality of Boucicault’s world with engaging design and comically heightened performances (his nimble cast double up to perform several roles), yet wisely keeps postmodern commentary to a minimum. It’s a fitting approach – knowing but not self-conscious – that allows everyone equal access to the play. Boucicault is here respected but certainly not revered, and the audience become co-conspirators in creating his historically dubious fantasy. Even Alyson Cummins’s handsome, economical stage is constructed before us, its exposed wooden fixtures slotted into place by the performers, while the Lakes of Killarney materialise as projected ink engravings.

Nobody understands the tone here better than Michael Glenn Murphy, sailing close to parody as Cregan’s crippled servant, Danny Mann, whose contortions are both physical and psychological. In this series of tangled love stories, it is actually Danny’s pathological love for his master (“Arrah! Wouldn’t I die for yez!”) that holds most fascination, while Boucicault depicts an indigenous Irish culture of unthreatening subservience.

On stage, cultural boundaries are more easily crossed. An assured Will Irvine divides his time between the roles of aristocratic Kyrle Daly and roguish Myles na gCopaleen, the first nursing an unrealised desire for Cregan’s fiancée, the wealthy Anne Chute (Charlie Murphy); the second nursing an unrequited desire for the Colleen Bawn. When a dependably spirited Karen Ardiff and a gradually loosening Anderson also play characters across the Anglo-Irish/ peasant divide via increasingly outrageous costume changes, the production matches rich good humour with an archly intelligent poise.

Music is integral to melodrama – informing both its structure and effect – and when this production’s most effective set piece involves Ciarán Taylor (who also plays the dastardly Mr Corrigan) drumming up a thunderstorm on a piece of sheet metal, it’s a shame that Philip Stewart’s compositions are not also performed live. Try as they might, nobody can make Boucicault’s Irish song inclusions feel like anything other than awkward party pieces. At such moments you may be reminded that neither Bedrock nor Project Arts Centre would have reached for Boucicault’s crowd-pleaser in less straitened times.

They're not the only suitors to be drawn to The Colleen Bawn's charms, but, more encouragingly, the consideration of their staging suggests their intentions are entirely honourable.

Runs until Sep 5, then tours to Civic Theatre, Draíocht, George Bernard Shaw Theatre and Everyman Palace Theatre