Reviews

Conversations on a HomecomingLyric Theatre, BelfastIf Irish people of a certain age find it hard to believe that the good times will last, it is because they have already experienced the grim aftermath of a boom. On the most immediate level, Tom Murphy's fierce 1985 play Conversations on a Homecoming demands attention as the bad dream that haunts the sleep of the Celtic Tiger.

What we have on stage is the wreckage of the 1960s boom washed up on the bleak shores of an East Galway town in the early 1970s. A decade after the high aspirations of Sean Lemass and the high-flown rhetoric of John F. Kennedy, the once-golden youth is dwindling into a sour middle age of lost hopes and corrosive cynicism.

The setting, brilliantly imagined at the Lyric in Monica Frawley's hyper-real designs, is a decrepit pub that once aspired to the status of HQ for a cultural revolution against gombeen politics and a narrow-minded church. Its owner, the JFK lookalike JJ Kilkelly, is off on another batter. His former protégés - the caustic schoolteacher Tom, the bumptious auctioneer Liam and the gentle, unaffected mechanic Junior - gather to greet the return of one of their number, Michael.

He is an actor in New York, the one who got away. If he has been a success, they will hate him for mocking their failures. If he has failed, they will hate him for dimming the last ray of hope.

From one angle, then, Conversations is a tangy slice-of-life, an exceptionally vivid and well-observed enactment of the mating rituals of the Irish male with the Irish pub. The evening is essentially a drinking session that follows the pattern that Junior observes in all such rituals: the complimenting stage, the insulting stage and the singing stage.

Within this apparently simple form, however, Murphy contains a range of metaphors and reflections that make this so much more than a parochial piece. At the psychic level, the play continues one of Murphy's favourite metaphors: one whole, healthy personality split between two half-men, the bitter realist Tom and the ineffectual romantic Michael. As Junior, ever the truth-telling chorus, remarks:"The two of ye together might make up one decent man". At the political level, meanwhile, the play is as timely for its dissection of the American aura of world leadership as it is for its more local resonance. In a delicious irony, one of the Kennedy speeches specifically recalled by Michael is literally engraved on the walls of the Lyric itself, testament to the enduring power of the rhetoric Murphy is subverting.

The joy of the play, though, is that these more convoluted currents all flow naturally from the mainstream of a readily recognisable reality. If the rhythms of Murphy's language and the clarity of his characters are looked after, they will emerge by themselves. The power of Conall Morrison's production for the Lyric is that it is a finely tuned engine, revved up with expert timing and then let rip. The ride is hair-raising and exhilarating.

There are one or two false notes, and Morrison almost throws away one of the key moments of the play, when Peggy, Tom's perpetual girlfriend (played by the always admirable Eleanor Methven) finds a voice that carries the echoes of lost dreams. But the electrifying intensity is never lost.

The performances, from Vincent Higgins's grotesque but all too believable Liam to Frankie McCafferty's sly, subtle Junior, to Barbara Adair's stinging servility as JJ's Missus and Lesley-Ann Shaw's luminosity as his daughter Anne, are as sharp as the play itself.

The heart of the play, though, is the bruising relationship between Tom and Michael, an affiliation as mutually corrosive and as inextricable as a bad, long marriage. What makes this a terrific piece of theatre is not just the hard, polished shell of schoolmasterly cynicism and atrophied intelligence Adrian Dunbar has constructed for Tom and the soft, vulnerable heart that beats beneath the too-thin skin of Conleth Hill's Michael. It is that the chemistry between them really makes you feel that if only they could fuse together, some extraordinary happiness might emerge.

Runs until May 4th. To book phone 048-90381081

An edited version of this review appeared in the news pages yesterday

Ghosts

Pavilion, Dun Laoghaire

By Gerry Colgan

Tom Kilroy's fine new adaptation of Ghosts is a creative transfer of Ibsen's great play to the middle-class Ireland of the 1980s. It retains the conflict of formal religion and private morality, of the destructive control of heredity over choice. The characters remain essentially the same, however, and in doing so affirm the depth of the author's understanding of human nature.

Mrs Aylward is the dominant creation, a widow who learns too late the corruption wrought by a loveless marriage, and the price of maintaining a social façade. Her efforts to save her son from an evil father, as she thinks her husband to be, damage them all. By the time she is able to confront the truth, irreparable harm has been done.

The adaptation finds sensitive ways to make credible some key developments in the play. Syphilis can hardly now serve as the hereditary curse so chilling in the original; so the son is HIV positive, and the debased nature of the father becomes the dread bequest. The chilling ending is here portrayed as a final umbilical link between mother and son, an acceptance of euthanasia. These and other variations are powerfully faithful to their sources.

Tim Murphy directs with a sure hand, and has actors who respond with their own certainties. Ann O'Neill's mother grows in inner certitude as the plot develops, finally a woman who can face and articulate oppressive truths. Karl O'Neill's priest, with whom she might have had a relationship had he not flinched from it, is a complex character. Gary Murphy's son is suitably cynical and despairing, a convincing portrayal even if a healthy appearance belies the disease beneath. (Has the art of creative make-up virtually disappeared from our stages?) Julie Sharkie's maid and Sean Healy's predatory waster complete a cast who do justice to script and direction, in a worthwhile tribute to the original author and his distinguished interpreter.

Runs to April 20th; to book phone 01-2312929