Everyman Palace, Cork
Michael Lovett's play, The Deadman's Beard, at the Everyman Palace is an important debut by a playwright whose work has originality and insight. Director Geoff Gould makes the most of the opportunities for surrealistic impact and Patrick Murray's set, Conleth Murray's lighting and Ray Barron's sound exploit the theatrical potential of this approach.
Other current Irish playwrights have seen their work elevated beyond its overt status by such an approach, and Michael Lovett's play invites comparison with the subversive vision of that contemporary convention. One element in dramatic fashion is to pose questions which are not answered in the text. Send them home wondering. For laughs, press the predictable buttons (predictable still in Cork, at least) relating to anatomy and fornication, and as often as possible.
Lovett succumbs to this temptation, but has much more to offer, especially in the character of Willie Higgins, the idiot savant tied around the necks of the luckless Brennan family. This presence, carefully written and acted with skill by Michael Patric, is a foil to the gaps in the rest of the script and prompts a catalogue of irritated questions: why are the corpses kept in the undertaker's kitchen along with the queen-cakes, the porridge and the neighbourly chats? Why is the baby buried behind the yard?
More questions are posed about the methods and religious and hygienic implications of laying out bodies before the final conundrum: why does the closing death occur and how?
I'm not saying that a play shouldn't pose these problems, but I do believe that the writer must make some attempt to solve them. The director has a responsibility here, too: the entire cast works hard and some scenes (especially those with Antoinette Hilliard) have a crisp edge, but others deflect attention through their own want of definition.
Micheal Lovett may not have found his theatrical feet just yet but he does demonstrate here a talent for occult lyricism; perhaps the problem with The Deadman's Beard is merely that of trying to construct a play which says everything.