Irish Timeswriters review American Buffaloat the Gate Theatre, Dublin; Othelloat the Helix, Dublin; and The Fieldat Everyman Palace, Cork.
American Buffalo at the Gate Theatre, Dublin
Everybody is familiar with the plot of the heist gone wrong. But in 1975 David Mamet made his name with an underexplored subgenre: the heist gone nowhere. His second play, American Buffalo, set in the stagnant world of two-bit hoods hatching small-time schemes in a Chicago junkshop, is more famous for what is said, and how it is said, than for anything that happens.
Mamet, an early poet of the profane, is one of the few voices in American theatre who could take the gallant swearing of Chicago crooks, measure it out in iambs, and make it sound like music. (When Teach fidgets on to the stage with his magnificent "F**kin' Ruthie" mantra, even Ruthie would have to be impressed.) As the junkshop proprietor Don (Seán McGinley) and his gormless young charge Bobby (Domhnall Gleeson) plan to rob a coin collector, and the hyperkenetic Teach (Aidan Gillen) attempts to swindle his way into the scam, the bluntness of their argot reminds you why Mamet was once considered champion of "photorealism".
More than 30 years later, however, and the photo seems to have faded. Why Mark Brokaw, who did such stellar and sensitive work directing Arthur Miller's The Price for the Gate in 2004, should run asunder with Mamet's barbed and bullish comedy, placing the emphasis on its comic wattage rather than its acrid social insights, seems less like a failure of nerve than a staling of the script.
The fractured syntax and amusingly meaningless dissertations, once a fresh departure but widely copied since, have now acquired the familiarity of parody. (Mamet hasn't written this way for years.) There is much to admire in this production: the completeness of Alexander Dodge's set climbing high with trash; the unshowy lighting of Hartley TA Kemp. And there is plenty to laugh at: the propulsive energy of Gillan's Teach, for instance, whose lines rarely come without a quick pirouette, his index fingers pointing out like cocked pistols. But there is little that convinces. This is most conspicuous in McGinley and Gleeson's performances, the mentor and student at the limits of their articulacy and comprehension, who (although their characters are patently dumb) have opted to play dumb, slackening their jaws and dulling their responses. Don and Bobby will always be undone by their words - they need no further assistance.
It's hard to shake the sense that this play - which, at its core, is an indictment of, as Don puts it, "f**kin' business" - is here being pitched at the level of a toothless sitcom. Has Mamet's work simply become a victim of its success, or is this the inevitable distance between Nixon's fall and Bush's reign - from angry cynicism to a mocking shrug? Peter Crawley
Othello at he Helix Theatre
"Men should be what they seem", proclaims Iago, but in Othello everything is deceptive. Virtue is villainous. Ugliness belies a hidden beauty. Confessions are really a tissue of lies. And Shakespeare's tragedy, named after its tragic hero, really belongs to Othello's nemesis, Iago, the traitor responsible for the machinations of the plot, and the man left standing.
Second Age Theatre Company's production is faithful to the subtleties of these illusions. Amidst the shadow's cast by Carol Betera's stylish slatted set and Sínead McKenna's lighting design, there is much room for dissimulation. The Moor Othello admits that he is "rude in speech", but Johnny Lee Davenport bears a classical stature and fluency that intimates otherwise. Desdemona swears she is merely her master's servant, but Maeve Fitzgerald lends a steely determination to the doomed and devoted Lady's self-defence. And while Simon O'Gorman, as the gormless Iago, swears with great determination that he "will not be womaned", he is undone in the end by his wife.
Alan Stanford's direction is exacting and concise, allowing Shakespeare's tragedy full illumination in this condensed version of the play. The hazy first World War setting, meanwhile, is nebulous enough to avoid intruding as theme. Performances are strong and follow clear, if unsubtle, lines of characterisation, which are easily accessible to the secondary school students that the production is designed for. Davenport, for example, is a noble Othello transformed to murderer, and his soliloquies become naturally integrated as the rambling inner monologues of a madman.
O'Gorman's Iago is also a modern villain, with Hollywood menace and a trademark evil laugh. Meanwhile, Colin O'Donoghue's Cassio makes for a handsome hero, and a credible leading man as the future leader of Cyprus in the future promised in the play's finale.
The teenage audience sat as comfortably in the darkened auditorium of the Helix Theatre as they would in a cinema. They were gripped in the pacy first half as the plot thickened, but less so as the bodies began to pile up, remaining unconvinced by clumsy stage violence and embarrassed by overdone death throes. Nonetheless, they seemed to appreciate the gravity of the tragedy and the sincerity of the performances, which they rewarded with heartfelt raucous applause.
However, as the house lights are raised, things are suddenly what they seem again. As the adolescent audience files out, the contemporary equivalent of Elizabethan language in the foyer rises to a deafening level. Iago's "a sap". Desdemona's "a state." Cassio, a heart-throb hero for teenage girls, is "a ride". One teenage boy shouts out that he's glad he's not "a bird", and his friends can't stop laughing. It would be a gross critical deception to deny that this is the real marker of Second Age's success. Until March 9. Then March 12-16, Townhall Theatre, Galway Sara Keating
The Field at the Everyman Palace, Cork
In choosing The Field for its inaugural presentation, Rockwood Productions made a wise decision: the play is so strong and its central character so massive that even an indifferent performance would have its moments. In this case Michael Twomey's direction and an experienced group of leading players ensure these moments accumulate to a convincing account of what is probably John B Keane's finest play, the one most likely to survive the easy popularity of much of his work.
At its least subtle, this is a play about a tribe; morally adrift and subject to primitive desires and fears with an almost pagan loyalty to inherited prejudices. Set in 1965, the plot concerns - it couldn't be said to explore - land-hunger leading to murder and communal silence. Keane overwrote this rural drama, allowing too many contradictions and given simplicities, but his authority survives in this powerful narrative. Most of that authority is invested in the character of the Bull McCabe; Paul Creighton makes him real, believable and commanding, a man who can relish his own brutality and justify it. But this is not a simple person and Keane gave him a depth which, when offered, can arouse something close to compassion. This is missing, and so are the complexities of some other characters, including Conor Dwane's slack-jawed Tadhg. Yet what might have been achieved is clearly indicated by the performances of Martina Carroll and Frank Twomey.
There are production problems, not least the rolling on of a wall and five-barred gate as the murder scene. Somehow there is no awareness of atmosphere, the fight scene lacks credibility, and there is a perilous tendency to pantomime towards the end. Until March 24 Mary Leland
