Peter Crawley reviews Hummin' at the Andrew's Lane Theatre, Dublin and Gerry Colgan reviews The Star Trap at Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin.
Hummin'
Andrew's Lane Theatre, Dublin
We've been here before.
Tony Guerin's first professional play offers a grimy kitchen and grimier characters: an iron-willed woman, a bullish man and two ineffectual others. They engage in a tussle over land, money and sex.
Added to the familiar mix are lashings of trivia, violence, profanity, missing bodies and a dead dog.
It seems a knowing pastiche of a tired genre of Irish theatre, but crucially Red Kettle's production lacks anything new.
Where John B. Keane fashioned the vehicle and Martin McDonagh hot-wired the car, Guerin now sells off the parts.
Geraldine Plunkett plays Jennie, an ex-prostitute who ruminates on the merits of sliced pan and the predilections of her former clientele. Her odious partner Mike Dee (Peadar Lamb) avoids marriage and guards the deeds to 50 acres of northern Kerry. Those deeds are just the ticket for Mike's unctuous nephew Andy (Brian Doherty), if he is ever to win the "heart" of an off-stage materialist.
Hurried plot exposition leads to frequent repetition and, after the interval, mere recapitulation. In the meantime, the cast tread water with bawdy dialogue that neither advances the plot, shocks, nor even titillates.
Guerin clearly wants to reinvigorate the formula through force, but fails to create a menacing tone. Frequent grabs for hatchets, the odd punch or strangulation attempt appear as empty threats.
Under Ben Hennessy's cosy direction, each punch is pulled.
An energetic Plunkett and sedentary Lamb invest too much verve in their bickering, to the point that even her disgruntlement is unconvincing, and a cowboy-thatcher love rival (Mal Whyte) derisible.
While sex was once an undertone of the genre, Guerin makes it the play's governing context. But the circular dialogue and tangential developments are a fumble rather than a score.
Ultimately, without anything fresh, Hummin' becomes a non-committal rendition of a too-familiar tune.
The Star Trap
Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin
The new lunchtime play in Bewley's is something of a novelty, an adaptation by Michael James Ford of a short story by Bram Stoker. The latter (a Dubliner, of course) was more than the creator of Dracula and other creepy works. He was secretary and adviser to the great actor Henry Irving for some 30 years, and before that was an unpaid drama critic for the Evening Mail - a truly macabre apprenticeship that may have served him well.
This entertainment is set in the theatre den of Jack Halliday, master machine operator, recently dead of apoplexy.
His apprentice, Billy, has just ushered widow Loo in to collect Jack's bits and pieces, and they get to talking about how life changed for all of them three years back. That was the time of the accidental death of top Harlequin Henry, in strange circumstances.
Loo has her suspicions and quizzes Billy about the events of that night on stage when Henry copped it. He should have soared upwards through the eponymous trapdoor, but a mechanical malfunction proved lethal. Was there foul play? Did Jack, incensed by an amorous relationship between Loo and Henry, do the dirty deed?
Billy knows and so, by the play's ending, do we all.
It is stylishly done, with attractive performances from Amelia Crowley and Alan Smyth, and directed by the adaptor. As is usual with Bewley's, meticulous care is paid to detail, including London accents, costumes and set design by Emma Cullen. The result is an atmospheric piece without pretensions other than to entertain; and this it does most acceptably.
