A complex battle

Jimmy Murphy's first play (Brothers of the Brush, in 1993) brought a breath of fresh dramatic air to Irish theatre with the authenticity of its insights into the effects of industrial power and corruption on the least secure of casual building workers. His second (A Picture of Paradise, 1997) offered a professionally solid and humane view of the underclass in a socially decaying flats complex. His fourth play, last night, retained his authorial social concerns for people in trouble but seems more distanced from its subject - the replacement of a small local Dublin community by flats for the profit of a property developer - and the displacement of folk who had come to depend on the local pub as a social focus.

Mick Ryan, owner of the Black Pool pub, is offered more money than he can refuse to sell his pub to Mossy Plunkett for demolition and, along with the pub, a cottage dwelling where Tommy, just retired from 40 years as a binman, lives. The pub has also provided a haven for Nora, a local hairdresser whose business is declining because of her fondness for vodka. Tommy and Nora are the Dublin victims of change and (it is faintly argued in the text) of change for the betterment of the city. Everyone else in the action is a culchie, including Sinead who comes from Longford, has a mortgage to pay off on a flat, and is to lose her job; so it's not quite a straight battle between the culchies and the jacks, even if Sinead is a flat-land blowin herself.

But there is an uneasy feeling that, maybe, Jimmy Murphy first found the issue he wanted to write about and then crafted and utilised his characters to flesh out his arguments, rather than allowing the issues and the dramas arise from the characters themselves. And there is more than a touch of cliche and contrivance here which gives the piece the shape of a soap opera. "I wish some developer would come along and find the derelict sites inside me," wails Nora in her cups, and "I feel like I've been picked up and dumped out," moans Tommy as he makes plans to go and live with his daughter in Bluebell. It's more thought out, but less committed than the author's earlier plays.

Jimmy Fay's direction is less attentive to detail than is usual with him, and less sensitive to sentiment. When Tommy and Nora have a flaming row, he leaves them no space or time for the reconciliation which the text requires them to have within minutes. It is implausible. This is more political theatre than the personal theatre we have come to expect from its author, although it provides a satisfactorily entertaining evening. John Olahan, Deirdre Molloy and Don Wycherly are the culchies; Mick Nolan and Veronica Duffy the jacks.

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