The Irish Timesperuses the latest tit-bits of culture
October
Olympia, Dublin
You can tell a lot about a play from where it begins. The hard, weary battlements of Elsinore herald a drama of constant defence and siege. An earthy shebeen duly abounds with tall tales and lawless bravado. And there's good reason that Godot will never visit a particular road to nowhere. It's perhaps telling, then, that Fiona Looney's new play, October,starts on a bouncy castle.
As Pauline McLynn's Noirín, sole survivor of Looney's hugely successful debut, Dandelions, leaps merrily away, those expecting a similar springy uplift – with occasional topples of emotion that barely leave a mark and little of real substance or meaningful structure – will not be far wrong.
It is the eve of Katie’s 21st birthday, and McLynn’s suburban martyr is cooking up a storm, while her sympathetic schlub of a husband (Lorcan Cranitch) carefully places a metaphor of hope and expectation in the garden.
Katie (Ailish Symons) has her whole life ahead of her. Noirín’s gazelle-like sister, Carole (Victoria Smurfit), has tottered home from London, trailing an impossibly glamorous existence as a fashion magazine something-or-other. Meanwhile, Noirín, who abandoned her job to care for her now deceased mother, is tired of being a domestic doormat. Someone has a secret. Someone breaks the metaphor. Someone makes a decision about her future.
Looney is significantly less interested in plot than the grazing pleasures of chat (it takes nearly 90 minutes to discover a crux of conflict). Her dialogue may seep sibling tension, with womanhood viewed as either resentful self-sacrifice or pampered self-absorption, but the overall effect is of one big long natter, full of brand-name badinage, gossip about neighbours, family and celebrities, and oceans of do-you-remembers. Looney has a columnist’s gift for great, pithy one-liners (Noirín casually dismisses daughter’s artless young suitor, played by George McMahon, as “someone who’ll hold her drink while she’s texting”) and a journalist’s drive for topicality (the credit crunch, Leas Cross and the many careers of Roy Keane all get an airing), but not yet a playwright’s command of drama. That’s underscored by a production that hardly exerts itself: director Michael Barker-Caven doesn’t break a sweat drifting characters between Jo Vanek’s ultra-realistic kitchen and contentedly fake garden, both lit with a benevolent, TV-studio brightness by Sinead McKenna.
October,though, really wants more light and shade. At a time when the country's prosperity is freefalling into hardship, Looney's play pushes for an accommodation between sacrifice and attainment, duty and dreams. Little of that would be out of place spread leisurely through the pages of a lifestyle supplement, rarely insisting on the platform of a stage (bouncy castle notwithstanding).
Cannily angled towards a female market, though, its true judge will be the box office. Still, when Noirín warns her daughter against the cruel autumn of sapping demand – “There’ll be other Octobers! Trust me! There’ll be endless f***ing Octobers!” – who wouldn’t feel a chill?
PETER CRAWLEY
The Home Place
Grand Opera House, Belfast
The year is 1878 and seismic social change is imminent in Ireland. Parnell’s land reform is looming, signalling the beginning of the end for the wealthy Anglo-Irish gentry. Christopher Gore is a prominent landowner who, in spite of having spent most of his life in Co Donegal, still thinks of his “home place” as the family estate in Kent. An upright and fair landlord, he is regarded with affection and respect, even by those who despise all he stands for. Yet Ian McElhinney’s face and demeanour are proof that, deep inside, Gore is tortured by the spectre of the storm clouds gathering over his privileged existence.
Brian Friel’s bewitching play persuasively states the case for both planter and Gael, encompassing familiar yet no less intriguing themes of cultural identity, race, the cyclical nature of history and, most complex of all, the deep-rooted meaning of “home”.
Mick Gordon’s new production enfolds the audience in the enclosed, protected environment occupied by the upper classes. Ferdia Murphy’s lofty set bestrides the stage of the Grand Opera House, evoking the three interlocking worlds of the play: the tasteful interior of the Big House, its carefully tended garden, and the plantation of exotic trees, beyond which lurk discontent, simmering violence and shameful poverty.
Aislín McGuckin is at once sensitive and spirited as the housekeeper, Margaret, with whom both Christopher and his son, David (Kyle Riley), are in love.
Hers is the performance that touches the heart, as the music of her childhood, sung by a distant school choir, tugs her between her home place and her adopted home, leaving her stranded in no-man’s land.
Conleth Hill is in fine comic fettle as the ridiculous and appallingly bumptious anthropologist, Richard, who is blind to the outrage caused by his crude tabulations of vulnerable local people. But in spite of high-profile casting and excellent production values, the characters appear somehow stranded and detached from one another and the lyricism of Friel’s written word struggles to emerge in full flight.
Until Feb 21, then on tour to Galway, Cork, Armagh and Omagh
JANE COYLE
The Giant Blue Hand
The Ark, Dublin
Anyone familiar with the grim events and brutal seams of tragedy running through Portia Coughlan, On Raftery's Hillor By the Bog of Cats– plays in which family life is seldom cheery – will find the following prospect either tantalising or terrifying: Marina Carr for kids. Anyone who sees Carr's splendid new play at the Ark (in an entrancing production from Selina Cartmell) will recognise just how inspired that idea is. Carr has written for young audiences before, and, like the best fairytales, The Giant Blue Handmingles bright desires with dawning dreads.
We begin with the endearingly sleepy Time family, where Mr Time (Don Wycherley) and Mrs Time (Catherine Walker), happily pyjama-clad and bed-headed in their lighthouse, are about to have an unexpected run-in with the most irascible sea monster since Grendel, played by Cindy Cummings and a fascinating mechanical contraption.
Separated from their parents and baby sister, Dilly (a funny, fuzzy creation who is either operated by a Bunraku puppeteer or accompanied by her own private ninja), Timmy and Johnny Time (engagingly played by Jack Gleeson and Robert Donnelly) are about to realise their independence early.
There are equal parts thrill and terror here, but first Timmy and Johnny must contend with their guardian, the ever-pungent Aunt Farticus Fume. Even if Don Wycherly were not quite so hilarious as a Barbie-obsessed grotesque who paints her rat-infested home black daily and has clearly chosen her purple wig from the Dame Edna rejection pile, Carr and Cartmell know what sets a pleasure-sensor alight and how to hit a funny bone. It’s a crudely effective gag when Fume, who knows no happy stories, tells of a chap who sells his effluence as apple juice, but funnier when she adds that it is marketed in the organic section of supermarkets.
Beautifully designed by Monica Frawley, who lines her space with the ring of a circus, the stage finds innovative ways to present standard tropes of the fairytale. The wicked stepmother scene is followed with a quest that thrums with the stuff of pure fantasy: magic swords, powerful amulets, enchanted gems and Catherine Walker. Returning as Queen Dalia, who resembles the progeny of a showgirl and a disco ball, she guides the boys through a daring deep-sea rescue, allowing still more riveting stage devices to plunge us into the depths.
Some will be surprised by how dark Carr is willing to go here, but even as the Giant Blue Hand boasts about eating his victims with mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise, each hardship comes cushioned with a savoury gag.
“Time can do terrible things,” says Walker, “but it can also do the wonderful.” That desire to explore the dark folds of fantasy in a production brimming with imagination speaks directly and sincerely to kids. To grown-ups too, for that matter. Until Mar 22
PETER CRAWLEY