Review

White Woman Street, Everyman Palace, Cork: The narrative eloquence of Sebastian Barry's play White Woman Street, in this Meridian Theatre Company production, provokes fine performances from a cast led by an outstanding Ciaran McIntyre as Moses Mason.

Mason is the reflective voice among a huddled mass of men riding the trails of Ohio, a location to which they have been drawn from different lands and for different reasons. As they tell their own stories, the atmosphere of outlawry intensifies, as if the men are exiles, not just from their homes but from their souls.

Here, as in other Barry plays, the search for redemption is fused with a kind of inter-dependent laddishness or bonding - a process eased by the undifferentiated US accents. When the men break camp, their restlessness focuses at last on a town to be revisited and a train to be robbed. This combined denouement is a challenge to director Johnny Hanrahan, met unsuccessfully by filmed sequences on the background screen. Except when used as part of the setting - rather than as part of the action - this device emphasises the gap between the screen and the stage, where events lapse into inertia while, for example, the filmed campfire blazes (perhaps metaphorically) like a prairie inferno.

Mystifying production details add to a sense of theatrical dislocation - the quantity of aluminium buckets being carried around, the very strange method, possibly unique to Ohio, of watering horses, the crisp new saddle-bags. Such fault-lines in the staging highlight the inaccurate similes puncturing Barry's lyricism, although the playwright, and Meridian, are very well served by the music of Pat Ahern, played by Mick Daly, Johnny McCarthy, Con O'Drisceoil and Ahern himself.

Mary Leland

White Woman Street continues at the Everyman Palace until March 2nd; to book phone 021 454 3210 / 450 1673