Fair Deal
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Liam Doona, set designer of this initially sedate but ultimately riotous black farce, can take justifiable pleasure in hearing that the house in which the disagreements play out is, to use a cliche, a character in itself. The yawning interior, every corner scuffed with ancient suffering, contains porcelain dogs, ceremonial plates, a cheap barometer, an unconvincing claret jug and a delightfully vulgar painting of an older lady wielding a (Chekhovian?) golf club.
For the opening, mid-temperature third of Una McKevitt’s new play for the Peacock, the house may indeed be the most compelling character. Conceived partly to ponder contemporary discontents about housing and social responsibility – the title references a Government scheme for long-term residential care – Fair Deal begins by introducing us to members and associates of a troubled Irish family.
Kiera Thornton (Caroline Menton), first encountered carousing with her boyfriend Rio (Jack Weise), is a sensible, if unfulfilled, young woman coping indifferently with an imminent crisis. Her grandmother, the lady in the picture, bequeathed her the crumbling house, and since the old woman’s death she has been visiting to take care of an unseen uncle with a terminal genetic complaint. Daragh (Garrett Lombard), her moderately successful actor brother – “small parts in big films, big parts in small films” – calls around with a curry the evening before the sick man, now unaware of his surroundings, is to be moved into care. Kiera is taking that opportunity to sell the house.
We are initially presented with an agreeable enough family comedy that raises polite titters rather than genuine guffaws. The atmosphere changes considerably when Aislín McGuckin, as Kiera’s fearsome mother, Sandra, crashes in the door wielding the For Sale sign as Vlad the Impaler might wield a head on a spike.
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Somewhere between a Strindbergian ice witch and an escapee from the Jackie Collins universe, Sandra has found success as a celebrity interior designer in Los Angeles. Dressed in stereotypical rich-bitch livery – everything that’s hard is gold; everything that’s soft is camel-coloured – she sets to tearing apart her weakish brother and her fatally moral daughter. “I’ve always liked houses. You can impose yourself on them,” she spits.
McGuckin’s delightfully foul performance alerts us to a coming tonal shift, but few will expect the melodramatic swivel that ultimately disrupts the play’s pseudorealistic progress. This asks quite a bit of the audience. Indeed, both Darragh and Kiera adjust themselves a little too quickly to the new unreality, as if aliens had arrived and they’d calmly offered them tea.
But it proves a risk worth taking. All four cast members, directed with great discipline by Conall Morrison, relish the opportunity to munch through the sort of bloody comic reversals that once powered Joe Orton plays. Lombard does hilarious actorly vanity. Menton just about maintains rationality. Weise returns with a malign twinkle. McGuckin correctly holds nothing back in her creation of a pantomime monster for the ages.
Along the way, the play’s more serious thematic concerns do, perhaps, get lost in the maelstrom, but, amid all this disreputable fun, few will think to complain. An absolute hoot.
Fair Deal is on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, March 28th
