By way of prologue, the audience follows a coffin and mourners around to the rear of the Belltable, and joins in the obsequies for Tommy, a native of Limerick born with the century and now dead on its final day. But he rises for one last journey down memory lane; and the show begins.
Author Mike Finn has, in Pigtown, achieved a nice balance of nostalgia and commentary, and not just for citizens of Limerick. An early radio, sometime in the 1930s, blasts out a Viennese waltz. In the street outside, seduced by the rhythm, people dance with whatever is to hand; a bicycle wheel, a butchered pig, a stranger. It is a moment anyone may savour.
Europe's first pirate radio station advertises the virtues of Carter's Little Liver Pills in the fight for inner cleanliness. It also offers swimming lessons, tonight on hand movements for the breast stroke, which have its listeners in physical and mental knots.
Tomorrow, it'll be hands, feet an' breeding.
A priest lectures boys on the evils of swimming, a talk that soon segues into a tract on nudity and the role of fig leaves.
Adam needed just one, Eve three; she had more to be naked about. Pointed comedy abounds throughout the show.
Perhaps for balance, the author occasionally takes a cold look at the underbelly of the city.
A local garda sergeant breaks ranks to reveal a sub-society of drunken husbands and brutalised wives and children. There is a fleeting reference to the tragic experiences of Jews, specific to time and place.
Director Terry Devlin has given the work a free-flowing momentum in the open spaces of the theatre, a variation on theatre in the round. The set design by Dolores Lyne works splendidly.
A cast of 10 expend talent and energy unstintingly, most in multiple roles. Brendan Conroy, chorus-cum-character, leads the fray, and Myles Breen, Mike Finn, Richie Ryan, Joan Sheehy and the others are all fine.
The Island Theatre Company has a good one here, with nostalgia winning hands down.
Continues to August 7th.