Memory can be a fickle reminder of past events but it suggests that Conall Morrison's new production of Brian Friel's 1973 play about the powerlessness and the exploitation of people living in poverty is more elaborate, more energetic and more caricatured than was Tomas MacAnna's original staging 26 years ago.
The background of the story is a banned civil rights demonstration in Derry in 1970 which ended with a fatal confrontation between the army and police and three innocents who had stumbled accidentally into the Guild Hall through a side door to seek refuge from the CS gas used to disperse the demonstration.
The three innocents are Lillie Doherty, mother of 11 children, one of whom is mentally handicapped, who doesn't really know exactly why she was on the civil rights march except that maybe it might help her handicapped son, Skinner who is purposefully homeless and out for bit of diversion, and the earnest Michael Hegarty who is a civil rights activist. Around them swirl the army and the marchers. Above and beyond them, as they make small talk, dress in the robes of the aldermen, councillors and mayor and sip some drink from the mayor's cocktail cabinet, there runs the tribunal of inquiry into their deaths where the judge wilfully twists the weight of evidence before him, the funeral Mass at which the priest twists their fate to his moral advantage, the RTE commentator covering the funeral exploiting their tragedy in oleaginous nationalist sentimentality, the drunken ballad singer claiming them as political martyrs to his cause, and in front of them from time to time there appears the American sociologist expounding like a chorus on the endless and repetitive trap of poverty worldwide.
Sorcha Cusack's Lillie, Michael Colgan's frenetic Skinner and Gerard Crossan's careful and committed Michael are individually well observed and each plays for the laughs that are available from their words, yet they seem to manage little interplay with each other so their dialogue seldom seems to interconnect while they are cocooned in the mayor's parlour. The rest are ciphers: Ian Price as the whitewashing judge, Lalor Roddy as the priest, Barry Barnes as the RTE commentator, Bosco Hogan as the sociological chorus and Denis Conway as the balladeer. The director's elaborate and prolonged linkage of the play at the start to the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972 by way of extended photomontages and other visual reminders and Dave Nolan's excellent soundtrack, seemed unnecessarily overstated.
