Reviews

Irish Times writers review Pilgrims In The Park at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, Sting at The Point Depot, and Playing Burton at The Helix in Dublin.

Pilgrims In The Park

Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire

Fintan O'Toole

The visit to Ireland of Pope John Paul II, in 1979, has provoked a number of good plays, most notably Eoghan Harris's The Pope's Gig and Michael Harding's Una Pooka. It is easy to see why: for anyone interested in the state of the nation, this was an occasion when a fair slice of it was gathered together. Its apparent success in marking Ireland as a traditional Catholic country, united in faith, made the visit a fixed point from which to measure the collapse of that world and to explore the retrospective sense of pride before the fall.

If the papal visit is, for these reasons, attractive to playwrights, it is also dangerous. Twenty-five years on, it offers an overly obvious short cut to epic significance. It comes ready-made with layers of heavy symbolism. The temptation is to feel that the basics of realistic playwriting - establishing a world, creating the details of individual lives, generating a meaning from the hard-won elements of the action - are unnecessary. The event matters so much that the characters don't have to. This, unfortunately, is what happens with Jim O'Hanlon's new play for the excellent Fishamble company.

O'Hanlon is a gifted writer, and the first act of Pilgrims In The Park promises a well-crafted naturalistic drama. He assembles a robust family group in an ordinary Dublin home, with holy pictures on the wall and a bottle of Paddy whiskey on the sideboard. The highly strung father, Ger (Enda Oates), turns out to be a spoiled priest, now working as an archivist at the National Library of Ireland. His easy-going brother, Francis (Barry Barnes), is still in the priesthood. His wife, Ruth (Catherine Byrne), is patient but put upon, tired of Ger's do-gooder obsessions with saving Wood Quay and doing soup runs for the Simon Community. Their son, Paulie (Paul Reid), has dropped out of college, dreams of being a rock star and is at war with Ger. And then there's the happy-go-lucky Michael (Steve Blount), who has arrived with hundreds of folding chairs he's hoping to flog at the papal Mass.

This isn't Shakespeare, but it's a reasonably serviceable set-up. The disgruntled son, the frustrated wife, the priest who's secretly in love with the woman who married his brother, the amiable chancer who provides light relief: these are familiar figments from soap opera but not necessarily the worse for that. O'Hanlon writes sharply enough to make the stereotypes come alive. When Paulie announces he isn't going to the papal Mass because he's helping out at a gig in the Dandelion Market by a band called U2, Michael advises him that he's wasting his time, because U2 will end up "playing support to Margo in the Deer Park Hotel".

While O'Hanlon's grasp on the Ireland of 1979 is not always firm - he seems to think, for example, that the founding of the women's liberation movement and the contraceptive train were then recent events - he does play nicely on the gap between what his characters knew then and what his audience knows now.

The problems start, however, when we discover that, when Ger is supposed to be doing his soup run, he's actually meeting up in the Phoenix Park with Joy (Neili Conroy), a homeless, drug-addicted young woman who reminds him of a daughter he fathered in his youth and allowed to be given up for adoption. The emotional traffic speeds in at all angles towards a grotesque pile-up. Joy has been seduced by a priest and is pregnant. Ger is driven into a crisis of conscience. Francis declares his love for Ruth even while the Pope is preaching. Paulie storms off after another row with his father.

And all of this emotional incontinence is made worse by an uncontrolled lurch into horribly overwrought language, such as "Will you be a holy father, Ger, and catch me when I fall through a sky of purple flowers?"

The one saving grace is that director Jim Culleton and his experienced cast preserve the sense of restraint that the writing loses. They have the wit to underplay, realising, perhaps, that if they overplayed the whole thing would have exploded, scattering a shower of neuroses over Dublin Bay.

Ends here tomorrow, then moves to the Helix, Glasnevin, Civic Theatre, Tallaght, and Draíocht, Blanchardstown

Sting

The Point, Dublin

Kevin Courtney

While U2 were previewing their new album at a small gig in their Hanover Quay studios, across the river another old new waver was bringing his Sacred Love tour to a sold-out crowd at the Point. I know where I'd have preferred to be.

It's nearly 20 years since The Police disbanded, and that trio's tight, snappy pop sound has long given way to a looser, less immediate style of muso soul. Still, Synchronicity II, welcomed like a well-preserved old friend, offers the promise of more Police classics to come. Brought To My Senses brings out Sting's Celtic side, with a lilting air that evokes colleens moving through the fair; Sacred Love, the title track from Sting's current album, is a brash tune with tantric sex appeal, beefed up by giant videos of ladies in lingerie. "I know nobody was looking at me during that song," he quips.

The band, featuring guitarist Dominic Miller and keyboard players Jason Rebello and Kipper, do their best to conjure up some stardust on Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, but some real magic comes when backing singer Joy Rose takes on Mary J. Blige's vocal parts on Whenever I Say Your Name.

He encores with Desert Rose, If I Ever Lose My Faith In You and Every Breath You Take; he should have left it there, but he can't help coming back with one more, A Thousand Years. Seemed that long.

Playing Burton

The Helix, Dublin

Belinda McKeon

Brian Mallon's Richard Burton stares at death with a snarl, loath to yield his mind to the haemorrhage that will claim it; in a hotel room, alone with a last bottle of vodka, he traces the years, the roles that have made him. He traces the marriages, too, and of the four wives it is Elizabeth Taylor who dominates his monologue. This is unsurprising, as from Taylor, and from the immense wealth and unhappiness of their life together, come stories of the starkest and most bitter humour. And it is of such humour that his final performance, marvellously delivered by Mallon, defiantly consists.

Written and directed by Mark Jenkins, this is the story not so much of a life in film as of a life lived as a result of it; from Hollywood Burton draws his lifeblood and his greatest suffering. Mallon is strikingly at home, bringing Burton alive on a stage wisely uncluttered but for a table, a chair and a liquid lunch.

In the first act his memory takes him towards Cleopatra (1963), the film that changed everything for him. Then Mallon's Burton attains an arresting presence, his wit turning to do full battle with his terror that death is near; a scene where he tries to scoff away the criticism of his own obituaries is particularly moving. But what this production shirks from confronting with conviction are the reasons for that criticism; the moments when his alcoholism must have been brutally ugly are strangely absent from this portrait. It gives us a memorable Burton, but one born of a selective memory.

Ends here tomorrow; at Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin, Tuesday-Saturday

Crystal

English Market, Cork

Mary Leland

Written by Johnny Hanrahan and directed by Tom Creed for Meridian Theatre Company, this is a convincing exercise in the theatricality of space. The story is simple: it is as if the priest, the Levite and the other passers-by explain why they ignored the man (or in this case the woman) who fell among thieves. De Tocqueville's notion that each of us is a stranger to the destiny of all others is explored through four

actors in different areas of the covered market.

Marshalled from place to place, the audience finally unites to hear Fiona Condon, as the injured Crystal, tell her story in a casual, expressive patois. As the characters speak, the arches, grilles, tiles and gates of the market contain and compress their lives. Even as the script flows into such occasional poetry as a graveside release of pigeons occurring "like a silent white explosion", the feeling is that there is more to be learned, more to be said. Some of the saying is rough, salacious and raw; it is no less funny for that, but one episode at least is utterly unsuitable for children. Intelligent playing finds subtleties in the text, and although the players are still their work has energy and vivacity.

If it were a happier story this would be magic; the lighting by Lucy Carter infiltrates Joran Osterman's design, and the good work of all five players is illuminated by the production team's creative response to the location, whose architecture delineates the affectionate geography of the written work and its compelling realisation.

Ends tomorrow