Very different Brian Friel plays opened in the Gate and Abbey theatres this week. PETER CRAWLEYreveiwed each
Molly Sweeney,
Gate Theatre, Dublin
“How do I look?” Molly Sweeney asks her husband during Brian Friel’s briskly interweaving monologue play. It’s not a simple question: blind since childhood, Dawn Bradfield’s 41-year-old Molly has had her sight restored through surgery and entered a new world of confusing information. Now she must learn how to see.
Patrick Mason’s elegant new production seems to be asking similar questions, the most difficult being how we see Molly herself. Is she an innocent, self-possessed ambassador of the senses – identified with flowers, dancing, swimming, her job as a massage therapist? Or a supplicant to the pressures of various men: her commanding judge father; Peter Hanly’s comically enthusiastic husband, Frank, who turns her blindness into his project (“What has she got to lose?”); and Michael Byrne’s ruined ophthalmologist, Mr Rice, who would redeem himself through her.
Everything is articulated in Molly Sweeney– it is, understandably, not a visual play – and Friel affords Molly an almost lyrical language of internal substance. But, barefoot and costumed by Joan O'Clery in a cornflower-blue summer dress, eyelids low and head bowed, Bradfield's Molly seems at once girlish and removed. Her presence is further sapped not because ruinous consequences make her a tragic victim but because the author has turned her into his hobbyhorse.
Inspired by an Oliver Sacks medical case study, the play works hard to make metaphor from the material. Its associations between the conditions of blind sight and humanity, colonialism and spirituality are deftly cerebral (“Seeing isn’t understanding,” says Rice), but so over-inscribed, like countless variations on the same theme, that they are not rewarding. When Frank savours the spiritual echoes in the neurological term “agnostic” then “gnosis” some time later, or tells a summarising parable about relocating a badger set, there is little for us to do except nod in recognition.
The best the production can offer, then, is poetic illustration: Paul Keogan’s set, with two rear windows, follows thematic parallels, its light blue walls and white cirrus wisps suggesting a sky through cataracts, while Mason moves the actors around a scattering of chairs to underscore a play of perspectives.
Such sensitive acquiescence to Friel’s ideas suggests there is little more to see here. But among an excellent cast, Byrne stands out by making Rice a performer of surgery, miracles and theatre, at once the most clearsighted and deluded of the characters. Somehow it is he who bears the tragic gait of this fitfully affecting play: a haunted figure, the blind leading the blind.
– Runs until July 23
Translations
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
Just as the sweet smell in the air of Baile Beag in 1833 is misleading – the treacherous scent of potato blight – so the polite efficiency of the British Ordnance Survey of Ireland, mapping, renaming and standardising the country, holds more sinister meanings. In the hedge school where Hugh (Denis Conway) and his earnest son Manus (Aaron Monaghan) teach languages with clear derivations, their own is being eroded by time, force and submission.
Friel's 1980 masterpiece is not a strict historical drama; rather it makes supple drama of history, finding eternal resonance in the competing identities of a nation and the undying pulse of its human concerns. It is heady and immediate, fully fleshed and ambiguous, operating best in the shades. Sadly, a lot of this is lost in the Abbey's Translations.
In design and tone, Baile Beag is pleasingly sunny and blue-skied, where barefoot farmers dressed in Joan O'Clery's cosmetic earth-tones gather in Naomi Wilkinson's cleanly rustic set under the uniform brightness of Ben Ormerod's lights. If the cast of Oklahoma!strayed in by accident, I'm not sure anyone would notice: "Oh the Irish and the English should be friends." This amplifies the early comedy of the play, where Donal O'Kelly's crackpot scholar Jimmy and Rory Nolan's earthy Doalty push harder than necessary, but its vision of utopia-before-the-fall unsettles the play's nuance. Conway's Hugh, with his Einstein hair and David Norris beard, should be eccentric, yes, but must overcome cartoon appearance.
Monaghan is well-judged and better contained while Barry Ward’s Owen, the expedient pragmatist and translator, and Tim Delap’s romantic Lieutenant Yolland, fretfully alive to the politics of naming, best restore the play’s balance, arguing insightfully while careening into an excited Eden: “We name a thing and – bang! – it leaps into existence.”
Director Conall Morrison has stressed his interpretations of classics before, but here he allows us to write our own subtext. When Aoife McMahon's excellent Maire quotes, "The old language is a barrier to modern progress," she could be addressing today's debate on Irish language in education. What remains stirring in Translations, is the play's generous act of self-definition, making poetry and identity from ambiguities of language and history. "Confusion is not an ignoble condition," urges Hugh, and likewise this is not an ignoble production. It has all the words, it may yet fully render their meaning.
– Runs until August 23
