Irish Times writers review Poor Beast in the Rain at the Gate, At the Hawk's Well/Purgatory in the National Library and Rhinoceros at Lagan Weir, Belfast.
Poor Beast in the Rain, Gate Theatre, Dublin
In the course of a wonderfully evocative programme note for the Gate's splendid revival of Billy Roche's Poor Beast in the Rain, Colm Tóibín remarks on Roche's "lack of a governing myth". He thus draws attention to one of the oddities that surround Roche's Wexford Trilogy of 1998-1991, of which Poor Beast is, in both senses, the central part.
Its well-made slice-of-life drama would be mainstream anywhere else, and indeed in England the trilogy enjoyed enormous success, culminating in a full broadcast of the plays by BBC television. But in Ireland, there are astonishingly few successful examples of such work in recent decades. An angular strangeness is, paradoxically, much more familiar in the work of major Irish playwrights than well-worked naturalism. Thus the irony that this most local and rooted of dramatists, whose universe is Wexford town, was ignored by the Irish theatre until he was feted in London.
Yet if Conor McPherson's sumptuously cast and beautifully designed production of Poor Beast marks a kind of belated recognition of Roche's achievement, it also, rather deliciously, pulls his naturalism back toward the anti-naturalistic Irish mainstream.
Roche's work may not be governed by myth, but McPherson reminds us that it's not entirely free of it either. Poor Beast, he realises, is pure Purgatory. Its people are paying for past sins, stuck for a long time in a place where nothing much will change until a price they cannot reckon has been paid. The sins are not even big or tragic enough to evoke the heroic damnation of hell. The charismatic Danger Doyle ran off to England with the wife of Steven the bookie, taking all the wind from the town's sails, and a decade on the lives of all those affected by this common-or-garden betrayal are still in the doldrums.
Roche's Purgatory is more Calvinist than Catholic. At the climax of the play Molly (Andrea Irvine), the lover whom Danger left behind, explains that "some people are born to be hurt, some to do the hurtin'. It's as simple as that." The lines are a key to the play's richness. The mood of fatalism should be bleak and bitter, but instead the feeling that people are doomed to be the way they are allows for an oddly tender forgiveness.
Like the results of the horse races that are broadcast in the bookie's shop where all the action is set, life's outcome can't be helped. The great achievement of McPherson's production is its sensitivity to the unsentimental compassion with which Roche views his characters' failings, its orchestration of a vision that combines astringency and absolution.
On the one hand, the performances expose the characters' failings with unmerciful clarity. The life of Don Wycherley's Joe, the sidekick Danger left behind, is a burst balloon into which he puffs the hot air of exaggerated memories. Irvine's Molly has coped with desertion by making a virtue of poisonous disillusionment. Garrett Keogh's Steven is so scarred by hurt that he is afraid of committing himself to anything, even the most banal opinion.
There are terrific performances from Dawn Bradfield as Steven's daughter Eileen and Laurence Kinlan as her naive young admirer Georgie, both haunted by the sense that they will inherit, in time, their elders' failures.
On the other hand, McPherson gives all this clarity a beautifully rich texture, exploiting its lively humour, its vivid language and its ultimate dignity without surrendering its simplicity. Liam Cunningham returns to the role of Danger, giving him the looming but spectral presence of a living ghost, doomed to haunt and be haunted. And this presence touches the rest of the play, lifting it beyond realism and giving it the quality of a ballad or fable. As in a ballad, or in the cheap love songs whose potency Roche exploits throughout the play, things happen because they happen. They pass as in a dream, quickly, blamelessly and movingly. - Fintan O'Toole
At the Hawk's Well /Purgatory, National Library, Dublin
Ordinary people do not speak like the characters in these two short plays by WB Yeats - but poets do. Here the words are supreme, and, as grafted on to myth and creative fiction, they generate images and moods that have underpinned their survival throughout the decades. The Dublin Lyric Players, directed by Conor O'Malley, give the plays a good outing here, in a handsome room downstairs in the National Library.
First is the tale of an old man who has spent his life vainly seeking to drink from a magic well that fills briefly only once a year. The warrior Cúchulann joins him on the same quest, but both are defeated, distracted from the fleeting moment by the guardian spirit of the well.
Effectively dressed in simple masks and simpler costumes, the actors catch the essential feel of the piece admirably. Michael Thornton plays the old man, and the impressive Jimi McKillop captures the young warrior. The chorus, and Olivia Pouyanne as hawk-custodian of the well, acquit themselves convincingly.
Purgatory tells the bleak story of another old man who, travelling with his hostile son, comes across the ruins of the mansion in which he was born, and in which he killed his wastrel father.
Now destiny has him again on a path of destruction, this time leading to his son. Beautifully written, the story draws from religious superstition and human frailty to create a sense of tragic inevitability, a touch of the ancient Greeks. Michael Thornton and Alan Carey play the duo.
Lunchtime theatre is scarce in Dublin, and these are worthwhile offerings. Purgatory continues next week with a different companion piece. - Gerry Colgan
Runs to Apr 15, and from Apr 19-22, at 1.10pm
Rhinoceros, Lagan Weir, Belfast
On the night in March 2003 that this production premiered, the bombing of Baghdad began. In the cramped darkness of the Old Museum Arts Centre, Ionesco's depiction of invasion and indoctrination resonated with a combination of defiance and terror.
Two years later, different battles are being waged for hearts and minds, in the assorted shapes of a UK general election and the establishment of democracy in Iraq. And deep inside the echoing chambers beneath the River Lagan, Kabosh has crafted another strikingly appropriate world for a revival, which has just ended a successful London run.
Within Diego Pitarch's lopsided, manically wallpapered set, nothing is quite as it seems. A miniature provincial French town comes to life, only to reveal a gallery of seriously disturbed characters, none more so than the paranoid Berenger, who relies on alcohol to keep his fears at bay. The fleeting appearance of a stray rhinoceros one peaceful Sunday morning provides the subject of much chat and heated debate. Some put it down to a freak of nature, others struggle to find a rationale for this bizarre event.
Under Karl Wallace's probing direction, the original cast of Jo Donnelly, Sonya Kelly and Karl O'Neill have uncovered new layers and a delicious fluidity of movement in their portrayal of a community, whose bourgeois existence is about to be shot to pieces. In turn, Sean Duggan brings a new softness, resignation and a beguiling hesitancy to Berenger, the poor sap doomed to remain physically untouched when all around him have shed their skins and joined the rampaging herd. A solitary walk back across the blue-lit, swirling river makes for a surreal final chapter in an intensely unsettling evening. - Jane Coyle
Runs until Apr 16
