Between nowhere and the American dream

ANYONE watching the work of new Irish male playwrights over the past year or two would draw some pretty unpleasant conclusions about the country. Plays like Enda Walsh's The Ginger Ale Boy, Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, Tom. O'Brien's Monday Night In A Country Town, and now Eamonn Kelly's Frugal Comforts are full of claustrophobia, violence, and a comedy so dark that it becomes almost invisible.

If you were to add some dramas by more established writers - Pat McCabe's Frank Pig Says Hello, or Roddy Doyle's television series Family - you would suspect that the violence is, like the snow at the end of Joyce's story The Dead, general all over Ireland. The world of the court reports - domestic murders, psychopathic young men, intimate badlands is finding its way onto the stage.

What is most striking, perhaps, is the fact that for many of the younger male writers, Ireland looks like a place in which you turn a corner from the 1950s and suddenly find yourself on the set of NYPD Blue. Images from transatlantic thrillers have been supper imposed on a stagnant society, making for a place in which boredom and isolation are relieved only by dream like acts of violence. In Frugal Comforts, as in the plays by Walsh and McDonagh, the television set is almost an actor in the drama, and the actors in the drama are almost like they think they're on the television screen.

Frugal Comforts, which was first produced by Punchbag in Galway last September, and is now presented by them at the Andrews Lane Theatre in Dublin, is Kelly's first full length play, and at an immediate level, its form is basic enough. It operates with a single naturalistic set, five male characters and a single linear plot. It is constructed admirably but in an unambitious genre, dramatic but not especially theatrical. Its conventions are mostly those of a well made play of the 1950s.

If its limitations and achievements are those of a first play though, it is still remarkably clever, full of guile and purpose, skilfully poised between the horrible - and the hilarious. It has a sophistication that belies the simplicity of its form. And the way it puts together past and present makes it all the more interesting as part of something larger in contemporary Irish theatre.

As the title, taken from de Valera's notorious "comely maidens" speech, suggests, Kelly's comedy is primarily ironic, derived from the contrast between an idealised past and a hopeless present. In, the world of the play there is neither frugality nor comfort but a desperate, dislocated existence doled out in a squalid Dublin bedsit. The characters are, in the words of one of them, caught, between nowhere and the American dream" holed up in damp obscurity imagining themselves on the mean streets of Manhattan. The punchline is that the world of the American cop shows - contract killers, drug deals, wade of dollars - actually comes to them.

If the story of people fantasising about heroic violence ending up with their noses rubbed into it sounds familiar, that's because it is. Kelly threads through the action a pastiche of The Playboy Of The Western World. The gormless Steve (a performance by Aidan Kelly that achieves the awesome density of a human Black Hole from which no light of intelligence can escape) is kipping down with his uncle Dave (Laurence Lowry) because he has had to leave home after walloping his father with a loy. Like Christy Mahon, he gains in the course of the play some new clothes, a sense of initiative and an equivocal freedom from parental tyranny, But unlike The Playboy, there is no real sense of liberation on offer here, in this world in which big sharks eat little sharks in an endless chain of petty oppressions.

The pastiche is more subtle than it sounds, and the ironic interplay of cultures is given a more immediate form in Mullarkey (Eamonn Draper), the hapless landlord, an old Corkman in a Dublin he no longer understands. There is a wonderful scene in which he conducts a nostalgic conversation about Cork with a hitman (Bill Murphy), not knowing that the latter has come to kill a petty criminal (Paul Walker) who has taken refuge in the bedsit. When the play's irony is fully articulated like this, it is genuinely powerful.

It is also at times genuinely funny. Kelly has a real Command of black farce, and in David Quinn's line production, the action gathers the kind of helter skelter pace in which the real slips into the surreal before there is time to wonder why or how. At its height, when Steve's quest to show his initiative by stealing a bag of coal intersects with the climax of the hit man's mission of murder, there is a brilliantly grotesque confusion of the ludicrous and the terrible, the Playboy and Pulp Fiction, as Christy Mahon meets The Monk. The skill needed to pull off such an unlikely conjunction promises much from Eamonn kelly. But the tact that it can be done within a realistic framework that contemporary Ireland really can be made to look like a weird collage of pre modern naivety and post modern violence without stretching credibility too far is more chilling than promising.