The Monk
Ambassador Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
Well, what to make of this? Rex Ryan, founder of Glass Mask Theatre, brings his one-hander about Gerry “The Monk” Hutch, veteran criminal and aspirant politician, to the imposing Ambassador Theatre at the base of O’Connell Street. The show premiered to decent reviews in a smaller space last summer, but it now manifests as an event, a happening, a cult.
Nothing could better confirm this than the appearance – at the opening night, anyway – of Hutch himself in a puzzling prologue. As The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (oh, puh-lease!) dies down, the lights pick out a grizzled figure in an armchair. The hopeful Dublin Central byelection candidate paddles back a few soft questions about his political motivations and ambitions. “I wasn’t doing it for the wages,” he says. “I was doing it for the community.” No career politician could waffle better. Asked to ponder what he would do differently in life, he ventures that he “wouldn’t get caught”.
[ Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch says he plans to contest Dublin byelectionOpens in new window ]
It is an odd start to a show that, Ryan claims, approaches truth at the most oblique of angles. “It’s my fiction. This is a fictional piece written by me,” he told Oliver Callan last year. Well, that was the real Gerry Hutch. I know because I went downstairs afterwards to check and found him taking photographs with admirers.
Ryan, son of the late broadcaster Gerry Ryan, has also argued that the piece, charting, in loosely chronological manner, Hutch’s passage from childhood misdemeanours in north central Dublin through to more serious crimes and on to mysterious affluence in Clontarf (where he was a near-neighbour of the young playwright), offers a “mirror of Ireland’s evolution” through the millennial upheavals. This does make sense. “We didn’t see it in Summerhill,” the “fictional” Monk says of the Celtic Tiger.
READ MORE
Whatever doubts one may have about the subject matter, there is no questioning Ryan’s flair for the medium. The director, writer and star occupies the stage with a steady confidence that admits only the most fleeting of doubts. On either side of a grid that suggests ever-threatening prison bars sit two screens that play disturbing, fizzy interlocutions or idyllic archive footage of Dublin before the fall.
Ryan’s script allows the audience to take this man for a victim of an unequal society or the hoodlum many believe him to be. Sometimes that juggling of realities stretches tolerance. The sketchy treatment of the murder of the journalist Veronica Guerin, in particular, feels less than adequate.
Ryan clearly has the talent to stretch out and forge a fecund career. On the evidence of this first night, however, it may be a while before he can escape the current phenomenon. A large audience that didn’t look much like those at the Abbey or the immediately adjacent Gate cheered heartily when Hutch made his appearance. “When they get to know me, they will realise they are dealing with a decent chap,” he said of potential election to the Dáil. Yes, a most peculiar experience.
The Monk is at the Ambassador Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, February 21st
