Smiley review: broad gags and grace notes

What does it take to qualify? A tight Northern Ireland squad, competing for the first time in Euro 2016, might be well placed to answer. But Gary Mitchell’s new play for the Lyric, a broad as you like football-cum-caper comedy, only tolerates a glancing relationship between success and actual merit.

“The old names and the old ways are in the past,” reprimands Tara (Jo Donnelly), a former paramilitary leader who has settled into a more sedate life of violent crime. Indeed, as the aptly named gambler, wise-ass and debtor Smiley (Michael Condron) receives an early punishment beating, some teams never seem to change their colours.

Smiley, however, has an idea so crazy that it might just sustain a broad as you like football-cum-caper comedy: He will recruit the motliest five-a-side team in the history of convoluted plotlines and participate in an amateur football league.

The team will include Smiley; Tara’s dim-witted, pop-psychology-spouting thug Malcolm (a fine James Doran); his deluded teenage son; the aggressive daughter of his terminally ill abandoned lover (bear with me); an Elvis impersonator (uh-huh); and Elvis’s drag- queen lover. Together, they will win a prize of £25,000, fair and square. Or they’ll steal it. Whichever.

Throughout the Troubles, Mitchell’s work often wondered where lives might lead if not saddled with grievances, through the dreams of punk bands or would-be comedians. Here he keeps things light, formulaic and utterly undemanding.

Still, there’s an undercurrent of what might have been; almost everyone had professional trials that came to naught. There is a routine anxiety that people will revert to their worst behaviour – the old names and old ways.

Director Conall Morrisson’s production, as pinging and bright as a TV sitcom, tries to glide over similar worries about Mitchell’s comedy, its humour disinterred from another era (circa vintage Mel Brooks).

Take Kerri Quinn, as Smiley’s ex-wife, sashaying in furs, animal print and a push-up bra, whom even Benny Hill might have found a tad overwrought. Or Tommy Wallace as the drag-queen Cameron, trilling through a ceaseless string of single entendres (she’s goalie because “no man ever got his balls past me”).

Mitchell lays on the sexual innuendo thick, and it’s very hard to keep it up . . . Ooh!

If the gags are open goals, Mitchell seems busier exploring the boundaries of formula without extending them. The design, interestingly, would apparently like to go further: Liam Doona’s contentedly artificial astroturf set and John Comiskey’s Elvis-inspired lighting rig make little winks at ideas of performance and imitation. And, in one throwaway sub-subplot finely performed by Gerard McCabe, the Elvis impersonator is encouraged to come up with some new material.

It’s a nice idea, to innovate within inflexible expectations, and though he becomes lost in the flabby material, that’s what Mitchell attempts here, adding grace notes of sectarian suspicion to the competition.

The team, who intimidate their way through early matches, finally discover a level playing field when they believe their rivals may be ex-IRA, ex-LVF or – worse still – PSNI members.

That brings a pleasingly acrid psychology to the cartoon of Smiley’s caper: it’s only when everyone is dirty that people will play fair. Until July 2nd