Everyman Palace Cork
Although confusion reigns throughout the Brown Penny production of Tea and Sex and Shakespeare at the Everyman Palace it is also, with a pun which the nature of the play not only forgives but invites, reined in.
What Thomas Kilroy's work offers is a confidence trick. It is up to cast and director (in this case Tim Murphy) to pull it off, up to the audience to fall for it, and on this occasion all contributors oblige. Inhabiting a set which might have been designed by Houdini, but is credited to Catherine Mulvihill, Gary Murphy's Brian is a playwright enveloped in a writer's block the size of the Matterhorn. The dementia that ensues has the hallmark not just of personal experience, but of some kind of genius in its evocation of nightmare and hallucination, of despair and elation and, crucially, of the uses of literature.
The pace sets the characters rollicking over the border between actuality and fantasy, but it never leaves them, or the audience, behind. Tim Murphy's hold on the critical core is such that the moment of transformation carries its full weight, no mean achievement in a play which comes so close to farce as this does. And when Brian and his energetic wife Elmina (Judie Chalmers) express themselves as Othello and Desdemona the coherent reference point is presented with compelling pathos. The acting honours are shared among a cast of quickchange artists, although Conor Tallon's abiding menace is particularly important, and the stage managers deserve special applause.