Rosie and Starwars

THE lovers from feuding or hostile groups, such as the Montagues and the Capulets, the Jets and the Sharks, and more are a common enough feature of dramatic works. They usually, however, get together or die together, unlike the young couple in Charlie O'Neill's Rosie and Starwars, now having its premiere in a marquee in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar.

Here they yield to the forces of prejudice, and break up. The young man is from a settled family in Co Clare, and the girl is an unmarried mother from a travelling community.

Rosie has an independent streak and has left her own folk, who live on a halting site and mind her baby, to take up a job in the nearby town and be on her own.

Seanie, a promising hurler fancies her, and is not put off by his father Tom's pathological dislike for those he calls knackers.

Events, stimulated by a county councillor of racist hue, lead to a Ku Klux Klan like attack on the halting site, with Tom present in a balaclava. He is partly motivated by a financial interest in the site but saves Rosie's baby from a burning trailer out of some basic decency.

The night's trauma forces the young couple to choose sides, and they end up where they started.

The play clearly has its heart in the right place, and eschews any studied neutrality; the travellers are persecuted, and their tormentors act from bigoted and mercenary motives.

It is propagandist on the side of the underdog, and appeals directly to those who espouse or sympathise with the traveller's cause the great majority, one would hope.

That worthy aim does not make it a particularly good piece of theatre. The structure is very disjointed, with an irrelevant and disconnected strain about hurling hysteria woven into it. Its characters are supplied less with dialogue than with mini soliloquys.

An excellent cast make the most of what the script offers them. Vinnie McCabe's Tom, Mark O'Halloran's Seanie, Eamonn Hunt and Brid McCarthy as Rosie's parents and Mal Whyte as an English reporter flesh out their roles with authority.

Aoife Kavanagh does something more for her Rosie, creating an original and fascinating character who is at the heart of the play's intent and accomplishment.

Garrett Keogh's direction modulates the actors and action so as to make little of the constraints of the venue.