Irish Times writers review Closing Time at the Tivoli, Done Up Like A Kipper at the Peacock Theatre, Jimmy at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, The Man Who Gave The Beatles Away at The New Theatre, The Leaving at Axis and Magdalene at Andrews Lane Studio.
Closing Time
Tivoli Theatre
Fintan O'Toole
There was a grim appropriateness to the opening on Tuesday night of Owen McCafferty's Closing Time. On a day when the peace process was being spoken of in terms of collapse, lack of momentum and absence of vision, McCafferty's image of things falling apart in Belfast had a more than theatrical resonance. Set among a group of alcoholics in the bar of a shambolic hotel, Closing Time is so downbeat it barely moves at all.
The play emerged this year from the British National Theatre's showcase Transformation season. It was staged at the small, intimate Loft venue. Staging it in a much larger venue as a big event in an international festival does McCafferty no great favour. Opening it in the same week as the Lyric's fine production of the great Irish pub drama, Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming is positively ruinous.
As an example of what you can do with a small cast in a naturalistic pub setting, Closing Time is simply not in the same class as Murphy's play. Exposed to a large audience, it seems very small, a skilful slice-of-life sketch in which the characters don't undergo any substantial change in the course of the day's drinking, except that they begin with hangovers and end up blind drunk.
The bar in which McCafferty's long day's journey into oblivion is undertaken is already a mess by the time the lights come up. The owner, Jim Norton's melancholic loser Robbie, is sleeping on a chair with a empty crate of Babycham in front of him.
The hotel's one apparent resident, Lalor Roddy's Joe, is rather improbably asleep on a bar stool. When Patrick O'Kane's Iggy enters with Robbie's libidinous wife Vera (Pam Ferris) we know within a few minutes most of what we will discover about them in the course of the play: that she is lonely and frustrated and that he is a sponger on an almighty batter.
Not much happens after this, but it happens very, very slowly. There is a lot of very capable drunk acting. Robbie tries to rescue his business from the final collapse that has been coming since he started drinking the money he got as a compensation when the place was bombed. Vera's frustrations come to a head. Iggy doesn't go home. Joe drowns his sorrows at the loss of his wife in a steady flow of vodka.
There are hints that McCafferty wants to lift all of this from the literal to the metaphorical, to make it act as an image for the betrayed hopes of the peace process. There is sarcastic talk of "new found energy" and of how Belfast must be changing because everybody keeps saying it's changing. Alec (Kieran Ahern) who helps about the place is a victim of the Troubles, brain-damaged in a mistaken-identity shooting, and his presence hints at some wider reflection on the legacy of violence.
None of this really works hard enough, though. Closing Time remains little more than a flatter version of Gorky's Lower Depths without the epic resonance plus a dash of Billy Roche's tragic romanticism but without Roche's haunting lyricism.
The main attraction of James Kerr's fluent but sometimes funereal production is the brilliant playing of Lalor Roddy as Joe. Roddy is quietly emerging as one of the finest Irish actors of his generation, with a grasp of emotional detail and a clarity of characterisation that give real depth to whatever he does. His cranky, sorrowful, despairing and compassionate performance here is what will be remembered when the play itself is listed among Owen McCafferty's early, rather unambitious, works.
Done Up Like A Kipper
Peacock Theatre
Gerry Colgan
trouble with Ken Harmon's new play is it never seems to make up its mind what it wants to be. It opens in comic vein, with a Dublin family having its problems. Husband Gino, a taxi driver, seems out of sorts, and wife Dolores thinks he may be having an affair, especially as sex has gone off the menu. Son Eugene is under exam stress, and has reverted to bed-wetting. Daughter Kim is trying out a new boy friend, Nathan, who is black.
The first act largely passes in setting out these characters and their dilemmas, and a couple of family friends, also in marital discord, are introduced. The dialogue includes a generous quota of creative profanity, not to be confused with wit, although it does generate some laughs. When Eugene appears, he is naked except for an outsize nappy, a present from father, and the two abuse each other in colourful terms.
But the second act turns serious and sour. The family is close to breaking up, and Gino is forced to reveal all. While working, he was stabbed with a syringe, and is being tested for possible infection. Bad news, but at least it means his family again understand him. It ends in a lively party with much sweetness, light and what used to be known as bad language.
There is a deal of predictability in all this. We believe that irascible Gino (Liam Carney) is really a good sort, and will pull through by the end.
Dolores (Jenni Ledwell) will stand by him. The children (Andrew Lovern and Neili Conroy) will rally to their dad, and Nathan (Chris Kelly) will join the family; no racism here. The friends (Kathy Downes and David Herlihy) will remain buddies. And so it turns out.
These are all excellent actors, and demonstrate their talents again here. But there is not a lot to work with, and Pat Kiernan's direction trundles the play along without generating much laughter or emotion. It ends in anti-climactic mid-air, as if unfinished; but anyway it's time to go.
There is a post-show discussion with Ken Harmon and Pat Kiernan after tonight's performance (and next Thursday with Ken Harmon)
Jimmy
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin
Ian Kilroy
A breath of fresh air blew through the Samuel Beckett Theatre on Tuesday as celebrated Québécois actress Marie Brassard presented her one woman show Jimmy; only recently translated from the original French - Jimmy, créature de rêve. A close collaborator of Montreal director Robert Lepage, Brassard has entered a new phase in her work with this production, going it alone as writer, director and performer for the first time. In this act of professional self-empowerment, she has freed herself from the script of others and created a resonant theatrical analogy of life, death, power and powerlessness.
The scenario is unique. Jimmy, the central fluid identity of the piece, is a gay New York hairdresser, born, à la At-Swin-Two-Birds, at the age of 33, into the suppressed erotic dream of an American general. In that dream, Jimmy almost engages in a kiss with his beloved Mitchell, a US solider and client at Jimmy's barber shop. Before the crucial kiss, however, the dreaming general dies of a heart attack, leaving Jimmy frozen in time at that erotically heightened moment when he is about to kiss his soldier. For 50 years he is frozen, but self-aware, until a dreaming actress summons him again into being. As an actor in the actress's dreams, Jimmy is at the mercy of another's dream life. He is forced into surreal and absurd situations he has no control over, where even his sexuality and identity are fluid, as the actress dreams him as both man and woman, as both Jimmyand her mother.
In this masterfully acted and supremely well-staged "creation", Brassard makes a distinction between the near powerless dreamed and the omnipotent dreamer. Jimmy is at the mercy of another's imaginings, incapable of controlling his/her own reality, and aware of the fiction of his/her own existence within this piece of meta-theatre. Despite the great comedy of the piece, Jimmy is existentially desperate as he waits in his limbo to be dreamed again.
Open to a multitude of rich readings, Jimmy says much about the fictions of theatre, the control, or lack of it, that we have over our own lives, and the insubstantial nature of reality itself. This is vital, world-class theatre not to be missed.
Definitely the best thing I've seen this year.
Runs until October 12th
Garvey and Superpant$
Ss Michael and John
Louise East
ANY company of seven performers who call themselves The National Theatre of the United States of America gets my vote, but this young Manhattan group are more than just a good gag.
Ignoring the spatial limitations of the six-foot stage (their tiny vaudeville theatre was built from scratch this week), Garvey (Yehuda Duenyas) and Superpant$ (Ryan Bronz) attempt to work out why they're here, whether they've been here before and why the hell the waiter (Dean Witherprik) is invading their personal space. In between these inquiries anything might happen, and frequently does - ensemble tap-dancing, a very un-mellow melodrama performed con brio by Jesse Hawley and Jonathan Jacobs, ear-bleeding thrash metal and some high-octane geometry. This is surreal on a shoestring, and although you're sometimes left longing for a hint of narrative or logic, for the most part, it's more than enough to sit back and watch theatre itself being deconstructed. Qwide liderally.
The Leaving
Axis, Ballymun
Peter Cawley
PROTESTERS don't do well in the Leaving. In Barnstorm's entertaining production of Brendan Griffin's rebellion examination, a group of school students hole themselves up in a local heritage centre the night before English Paper I. Once locked into the room of a hunger-strike hero, however, the possibilities for both significant protest, and the plot, start to dwindle.
Neatly exploring the adolescent tear between rebellion and conformism, an assured cast balances playful style and serious intent under director Philip Hardy. An energetic opening sequence, where John Ryan's pumping techno is harassed by soulless exam questions, establishes the tone while the play routinely segues into sardonic fantasies: a CAO quiz show; a droll tableau of parental pressures; competitive study regimes. Less successful are Griffin's "Breakfast Club" stereotypes of nerd, rebel and debs' queen delineation, but the play seldom becomes condescending, retaining its appeal and relevance to students, families and survivors alike.
Peter Cawley
Magdalene
Andrews Lane Studio
TONY Barrow's play is the breathless litany of a woman abandoned. Aisling Farrell as Magdalene can no longer bake bread and pace the floor remembering the man she has lost, but must trace his footsteps on a journey up a path that seems to go on for days. Farrell is at her most affecting as the biblical figure when she is allowed to flesh out those parts of the story that are conspicuously absent; when she recalls the teenage Christ, his sexual awakening, his inability to resist the prostitute's gaze and the lure of the turquoise scarf that means she is open for business. But for the most part, Farrell is caught up in an interior monologue, chiding herself, urging herself on, in language that quickly begins to irritate with its clichés; an unfortunate distraction from what could have been an absorbing reimagining of an underimagined tale.
Belinda McKeon
