Mary Murray lights up No Smoke Without Fire | Theatre review

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If you ever wanted to see more of the performer Mary Murray (and who could blame you?) here comes a new run of her performance vehicle, a one-woman show about people left out in the cold. More precisely, Paddy Murray’s play, written for his daughter, is set outside a pub in the earliest days of the 2004 Irish smoking ban.

“We’ll be all dying of pneumonia thanks to Mr Martin and his health policies,” complains Mrs Gibney, the first of six women we meet, huddling outside to preserve an oral tradition. Gibney’s character, an elderly woman for whom Murray stretches her lower lip down and wide, suggests a lifetime spent sucking lemons, with new cause for bitterness. Her nemesis, Mary Kelly, is a rough customer whose twin sons are in prison for a post office robbery, and whose €60,000 haul is the subject of much gossip. Where is it?

In convoluted pursuit of this buried treasure, the play is flavoured with lightly salted comedy. When Kelly dismisses Gibney as an unreliable souse, it’s with Willy Russell levels of gentle irony: “Sure, I do see her here myself every day of the week.” The pleasure of the performance is to see Murray slip between characters. An actor of tremendous physical versatility and wit, she falls into comic contortions as a simpering pregnant woman, puffs up and out to play a Liverpool vamp, and demonstrates myriad ways to inhale, each as individual as a fingerprint. Some characters are plainly inessential, however. A lost D4 wan seems there only to exhibit Murray’s range, while others, such as a naive Chinese lounge girl, skirt dangerously close to parody: performing ethnicity, however sensitively, is an ethical minefield.

Director Jimmy Smallhorne isn't keen to provoke, either; he is more at home with the soft comedy of having the Pink Panther theme rise up as the plotting turns towards caper. That means darker moments are left under-investigated: when Barbara, a no-nonsense bookies' employee, is physically harassed, it's legitimately threatening, and it sharpens an uneasy and unchecked feeling in the play. Although the female characters tell this story, few of them exert much agency in it; mainly the unseen men advance the plot. Gibney may rail against the meaning of the word "passive", but only in relation to smoking.

It's only Murray's assured presence that mounts a challenge. Alone on a bare stage in a figure-hugging floral-pattered dress, her neutral state is one of default femininity, and though she might have had more fun playing across genders, or seizing a female character with something like her own potency, the aim here is to put marginalised characters centre stage. Is it any wonder these side-lined smokers light up at the chance? Until June 13th