Anything But Love

Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick

Inspired by Kate O'Brien's 1934 novel, The Ante-Room,Mary Coll's new play acknowledges its debt in structure, setting, characters and circumstance but builds something new within an established framework.

Anything But Loveis based on a story of death, family, forbidden love and Catholic repression. The play's renovations are admirably thorough, nowhere more so than in Coll's liberally deployed contemporary wit. Her modern Limerick version brings an internal drama out into the open.

Cathy Belton’s Annie epitomises confinement, barely tending to her dying mother while Mirjana Rendulic’s Polish nurse, Kalena, conducts the messy business. In the meantime she trades barbed affections with Ritchie (Malcolm Adams), a gay musician with HIV and an acid tongue, who is more performer than brother, and Marie Rose (Caítríona Ní Mhurchú), a sister as saucy as her name, who is entirely unaware that her unhappy husband Vincent (Malachy McKenna) is secretly in love with Annie.

Tortured by conscience, Belton is best when physicalising her struggle, crumpling in one scene like a slowly collapsing tower. It’s a moving response to the looming proportions of Ferdia Murphy’s drawing room set, stifled with heirlooms, short on exit points and lit with tenuous sunshine or muted evenings by Kevin Treacy.

Not everything benefits from being writ large, though, and caustic dialogue often comes at the expense of depth. Ní Mhurchú struggles to humanise the tart-tongued Marie Rose while Adams, whose character encapsulates the compromise between love and cold pragmatism, remains more enjoyable than credible.

Similarly the agony of an apparently chaste, unexplained relationship between McKenna and Belton can seem implausibly anachronistic, just as Annie – never ascribed a job, duty or back story – often seems barely there.

The music of melodrama is no shameful thing, which is why Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin’s score seems more present than the characters.

Those accustomed to it know that passions flare, torment erupts and people fearlessly say things like, “The women in this house aren’t always what they seem.”

Director Joan Sheehy allows such pleasures but muffles their extremes and the production hasn’t yet found its balance. Still, the defining note of the play is one of sad humour and cynical settlement. “Excellent,” says one character when someone agrees to marry him. “We’ll shake on it.”

Runs until December 11th