Reviews

Irish Times writers give their verdict...

Sweet Bird Of Youth

Liberty Hall, Dublin

By Fintan O'Toole

In the past few years a number of our best playwrights have been trying to write a play that will get to the heart of our political corruption. Much extraordinary talent has been devoted to finding the right mix of the personal and the political to capture the something that is rotten in the state of Ireland. And as nobody has quite managed it yet, our dramatists could do worse than have a look at the New Theatre's production of Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird Of Youth.

For a long time Williams was scarcely regarded as a political playwright. But Vanessa Redgrave's recent rediscovery of Not About Nightingales, his powerful lost early play, and its successful revival by Britain's National Theatre have changed that. Set in a prison, its exploration of power, sex and violence in an overtly political context was a startling reminder of the broad but passionate leftism that underlies his best work. And if that passion was so marked at the very beginning of his career, Sweet Bird Of Youth, his last great play, brings it to forceful maturity.

Tim McDonnell's production is claimed to be the Irish premiere of this extravagant drama of 1959, and, if this is so, its eventual arrival is as timely as its long absence is remarkable. For not only does Sweet Bird Of Youth provide a fascinating example of how to interweave an epic political story with an intimate psychodrama, but it does so in a context - that of racism - that has never been more resonant in Ireland.

Writing on the cusp of the great struggle for civil rights in the Deep South, Williams explores the psychosexual roots of white power. He creates an image of a society whose violence and madness are fuelled by an inner awareness of impotence, both in the body and the body politic.

The ageing Boss Finley is, according to the message scrawled in lipstick by his mistress in the ladies' room of the hotel in his Gulf Coast domain, "too old to cut the mustard". His daughter Heavenly, infected with venereal disease by her lover, has had her womb removed and feels "dry, cold, empty, like an old woman". And the overarching image of the play is castration: a reality in the case of a black man assaulted by racist thugs (the Boss, in language so familiar in this country, understands but does not condone) and a threat in the case of Heavenly's lover Chance, who returns to town as a gigolo in the company of an ageing movie star.

Perhaps one of the reasons the play has not been performed here before is that it operates on a huge scale, both in terms of its almost Jacobean canvas of sex, violence and politics and more prosaically in its demand for a large cast. It has three big operatic roles: the doomed Chance, the grand star Alexandra del Lago and the richly horrible Boss. But it also needs good acting in a range of minor roles, for Williams wants to show us, through the Men in Bar no less than through the Boss, a whole world on the brink of collapse.

McDonnell and his company therefore deserve great credit for taking it on. They can't give us galactic stars and top-drawer production values, but they can, and do, give a very solid and clear account of a significant play. Anthony Fox and Maria Hayden, who play Chance and Alexandra, may not be luminous presences like Paul Newman and Geraldine Page (who created the parts on Broadway and in the subsequent film), but they give a very decent account of the roles. Patrick Joseph Byrnes may be too young and slight for Boss Finley, but he shows acute intelligence in presenting both the monstrous and pathetic sides of the man. And the supporting cast is excellent, with Jason Gilroy, Elaine Jordan, Arthur Kearns and others proving the adage that there are no small roles.

The only real problem is the pace, which at its most rapid is deliberate and at its most funereal is laboured. A playing time of more than three hours is not just uncomfortable in itself; it loses the sense of an unstoppable slide towards doom that the play needs.

But this slowness is a function of McDonnell's sense of how hard to master this play is. It is, on the whole, better to move slowly towards the summit than to ignore danger and fall on your backside; however gradual the ascent, they get there in the end.

Runs until September 27th

Entertainment

Project Cube, Dublin

By Stephen Dixon

Your manipulative clowning had the school bullies baffled, and after college it had become ingrained, and you kind of drifted into stand-up as a way of avoiding proper work, or to kill time until something more interesting turned up, or to confront your pathetic demons, or to impress girls or whatever - you can't actually remember why you started doing it for a living, and it doesn't really matter any more, because, to be honest, these days you no longer find anything funny. You look around and you see that the world, in general, is not a funny place.

Alex Johnston's solo play deconstructs stand-up in several ways.

There is the purely technical ("I want you to remember that last piece of information because it'll be important later; this is what, in the trade, we call foreshadowing") and the generational gulf of incomprehension between the old-style gag merchants and today's post-observational comics.

There is the plight of the intelligent performer who has matured into someone who wants to use the spotlight to examine basic truths about the sorry state of humanity and gazes out at the expectant faces of an audience who cannot be cheated and whose needs

are simple: a few drinks and a few

laughs.

Most compellingly, Johnston deals with those horrifyingly delicious moments when a comedian starts to disintegrate mid-routine through panic, drink or, indeed, brave and on-the-edge stagecraft (if you've seen Johnny Vegas live, or Dylan Moran in his early days, you will know what I mean).

He also probes the extent to which laughter really is the best medicine in routines about cancer, Nazism and child murder (the latter safely anchored in the distant past, however), because "I wanted to see if it was possible to tell jokes that nobody would laugh at".

No matter how carefully rehearsed and oft-repeated, stand-up has to appear spontaneous, so in Johnston's provocative work, immaculately directed by Jimmy Fay, we can also enjoy the layered spectacle of an actor and writer acting ad-libbed comedy routines. It has to be said that these are often far funnier and better performed than the real thing.

And avoiding the real thing -

comedy as comfort food, comedy as escape - is what this sharp, clever

play is all about.

Runs until September 20th

Baobabs Don't Grow Here

Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast

By Jane Coyle

Beware of what you wish for: your wish could come true. Martig and Isca, a young Romany couple, should have heeded those words when they left their native town to go in search of the baobab tree. Goaded by the cruel taunts of Martig's elderly mother and bound in their devotion to the belief that the flower of the baobab brings fertility to a barren marriage, the two set out at dead of night to find the elusive plant.

They travel to Cairo, to Tripoli, to Marrakesh, where they experience many setbacks before learning that, although they are on the right continent, the baobab flourishes thousands of miles away, in South Africa. There follows a fantastical journey, portrayed with tremendous ingenuity, whose brilliantly crafted conclusion brings us back to where it all started and whose unfolding outcome we did not see even when it was staring us in the face.

Fresco Theatre is an international company based in Johannesburg. The performers, Helen Iskander, a Briton, and James Cunningham, a South African, are a husband and wife whose stunning mime, clowning and physical performance carry all the hallmarks of their training at the Jacques Lecoq International School, in Paris.

With their striking individual appearances and clear delight in each other's presence, they cut an an exhilarating, hypnotic stage pairing.

If there is a criticism that could be levelled at thisbewitching little play, it is that it is a shade too long, with the pace dropping off during the slightly overplayed comic scenes in the Marrakesh souk and the great wastes of the Sahara. But the twist in the tail comes at exactly the right moment, bringing tears to our eyes.

Ends tomorrow; at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, Wednesday-Saturday