With the Patrick Kavanagh centenary celebrations in full swing, it was inevitable that someone would want to create a play based on the work of such a key Irish writer.
It is also inevitable that such an enterprise faces a huge challenge. There are two rather paradoxical difficulties. One is that Kavanagh wrote no plays. The other is that previous stage adaptations of Kavanagh's works have been so successful that Declan Gorman's dramatisation of Kavanagh's memoir The Green Fool for his Drogheda-based Upstate company has a lot to live up to.
Gorman must have been both daunted and encouraged by the history of Kavanagh on the stage. Daunted because the record includes P.J. O'Connor's version of Tarry Flynn at the Abbey in 1967 (with a legendary performance from the great Donal McCann); the landmark 1983 Tom McIntyre/Tom Hickey/Patrick Mason version of The Great Hunger that stunned audiences by translating Kavanagh's verbal images into a gestural and visual language; and Conall Morrison's inventive and visually rich take on Tarry Flynn at the Abbey in 1997. Encouraged because, despite this record, it proves that Kavanagh's vivid, earthy and concrete style is unusually receptive to theatrical interventions.
The Green Fool is Kavanagh's orphan. Published in 1938, it was quickly withdrawn after a libel action by Oliver St John Gogarty. It was partly reworked by Kavanagh a decade later for Tarry Flynn, with a stark change of mood from the playful optimism of the first book to the tragic-comedy of the second. Gorman uses this shift in perspective to open a way in to the text. By confronting the younger, more hopeful Kavanagh who is writing The Green Fool with an older Kavanagh whose perspective has both darkened and deepened, he manages to create, to an extent, a dramatic tension that the memoir itself lacks. Using a technique that worked well in one stage adaptation of Behan's Borstal Boy, he sets up a tension between the mature, hardened writer, and his own naïve youth.
Gorman gives us a gloriously perverse version of Kavanagh's text. The controlling voice is the poet's older persona, who informs his younger self that the memoir he is writing is a concoction of bad writing, lies and Celtic Twilight exaggerations. Brave and true as this surely is, it is also problematic. Since most of the show is a re-enactment of scenes from The Green Fool, and since we are reminded regularly that it is meretricious and inauthentic, the audience is left in no-man's-land. We are warned not to invest too much in the re-enactments. But we are not given enough of the older Kavanagh to entirely invest in him either.
It doesn't help that the complex structure manifests itself in a sense of physical overcrowding. The play is essentially non-naturalistic but it hovers sufficiently around a half-hearted realism to demand a very convoluted set from designer Paul O'Mahony.
The two Kavanaghs are crushed into a boxy room that in turn leaves little room for Gorman's energetic cast to give full expression to his vivid and cleverly conceived scenes. Without the fluidity needed to shift between four different levels - young Kavanagh, old Kavanagh, scenes from the book and the Gogarty libel trial - Gorman's considerable style as a director gets cramped.
It's a pity because, when it does manage to get going, the show is wonderfully engaging. Padraic McIntyre, who plays the older Kavanagh and a host of small roles, is terrific and Nick Lee as his younger self manages to be innocent without being irritating. With the rest of the cast playing a host of characters, Gorman's narrative skills emerge. That he has the honesty to tell us he doesn't quite believe the story he's telling is to his credit, but to the play's detriment. - Fintan O'Toole
Showing until tomorrow, then touring
