It had to happen; after a generation of packing out theatres all over Ireland, John B. Keane's The Matchmaker has produced offspring with similar ambitions. Author-director Terry Byrne has mined another stage work from the same Keane Letters that inspired the first, and again found laughter aplenty.
It opens in 1957 in the small pub of Dicky Mick Dicky O'Connor (Des Braiden), who is trying to supplement its marginal income with a few quid from matchmaking. He is a widower with no surviving family, and brings in his nephew Sean (Enda Oates) to help out and ultimately inherit the pub. For the play's purpose, Sean is an observer-narrator.
After this exposition, it's straight down to business. Fionnuala Crust (Ann O'Neill) has a gripe; Dickie fixed her up with a man who can't perform, and she wants her money back. Later, lightning strikes again, and a second attempt fails, but it's third time lucky for her and Roger the jockey (Keith Willis).
Thady (Nicholas Grennell) has a wife who, with the support of the local clergy, offers him minimal sexual sustenance, but Dickie has the cure for that. It turns the woman into a sex maniac, and Thady lives to regret his appetite. Lena (Eileen Colgan), an elderly widow, is sent in the direction of Claude (Brian de Salvo), a randy aristocrat with a line in courtship which is much too direct.
So it goes, frothy fun but little more; the laughs are not so much rooted in persuasive realities of character and situation as in comic exaggeration. That is a mild enough demurrer, offered more in tribute to Matchmaker I than to spurn the pleasant entertainment of its successor. The excellent cast, which also includes Anne Brogan, seize their opportunities with gusto.
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