FIONA LOONEY'S PLAY, October, which opens at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin next month, is a sequel to her successful first work for the stage, Dandelions, and takes up the story of suburban housewife Noirín Dawson seven years after the original play. Noirín's daughter Kate is about to celebrate her 21st birthday and Noirín's sister Carol arrives from London with a suitcase full of designer gear and a new 'e' on the end of her name.
Playing Pauline McLynn's sister will come naturally to Smurfit, who has known the author and former Mrs Doyle since their days on Ballykissangel. The friendship was cemented four years ago when they travelled to Tanzania together with World Vision to visit the children they sponsored and promote the agency's work.
"Pauline is so effervescent and chatty and so funny that it allows me to be the straight man and sit there. And with sisters you've always got that dynamic of being the same different people. There are some rare fights in the script. Fiona has written some proper family to-the-knuckle, to-the-bone fights and I think the director was a bit surprised when we came for the read-through and the pair of us round the table went 'bang'. We know each other well enough to feel comfortable."
The sister dynamic runs through the play. At the start "they're not listening to each other and Carole comes back with this bombshell. She has lived this life where it has all been about her. And as far as Noirín is concerned it has always been about her. Carole's completely oblivious to a lot of it but she knows there's some of it that's always been there. She's coming back with this 'surprise' would be the way Carole would think of it, but shock would be the way Noirín would go for it.
And Noirín has just come out of a place where she's been nursing their mum, and Carole did nothing towards that. So there's just bitterness and recrimination, on top of laughter.
"The pawn is Noirín's daughter," Smurfit explains. "My character is the glamorous aunt who has the geegaws in her handbag and can tell her how to do her hair and all those shiny things that a 21-year-old thinks are fantastic, that secretly even Carole knows are pretty worthless. Carole does know that what she has in her handbag of tricks is puddle-shallow, and that's her sadness.
"There's a lot of 'isn't life funny', but there's a swathe of humanity pulling all the glamour off it and calling it the way it is. It's still hilarious and the stuff between Noirín and Frank is classic marriage comedy, but there is this current of family agony running through it, and I think every family has got a slice of that."