The House Must Win
Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire
★★★☆☆
In a small town in the west of Ireland two brothers who’ve been through a lot arrive at what is surely a painful separation. They’ve survived a father with a gambling addiction; now their many years together come to a surprisingly blase end. “You’re gone?” asks Luther, a blank-faced poker player in substantial debt. “Love you, brother. Good luck.”
Luther seems as taciturn as his creator. For two decades Mick Flannery has been known for carefully crafted folk songs with vividly descriptive lyrics. He’s also a man of few words who talks about his shyness in interviews. Unsurprisingly, he keeps things brief with his dialogue for The House Must Win, his gritty musical for the Pavilion Theatre and Rosa Productions.
It’s an adaptation of Flannery’s debut album, a multicharacter tale of a family unravelled through gambling that was released in 2007. The task of transforming a selection of songs that are predominantly slow blues with occasional spikes of rock, featuring melodies carefully written for a low, gravelly voice, into something as emphatic as a musical is one that Flannery has tackled before, in his dark bar-room musical Evening Train.
Here, he has set the story in the 1970s, when those looking to escape a provincial town with declining industry have their eyes on President Richard Nixon’s United States. We see Frank, a cautious, lonesome bartender (played by Niall McNamee) who’s on the verge of departure, watching his brother Luther (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) sink deeper into debt to a card sharp (played by Tommy Tiernan).
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Flannery wrote several of the songs as conversations to be sung as duets: we see Frank and his mother (Orlagh De Bhaldraithe) circle their family trauma, and Luther and his girlfriend (Tabitha Smyth) debate whether to emigrate. But, essentially created for Flannery’s own voice, they are slow and often involve short, low notes, with lyrics that are insistently indirect in their metaphors and cockeyed, Dylanesque observations.
Such viscousness risks sapping the energy of Julie Kelleher’s production. In the pop of songs such as The Tender, the musical becomes something else entirely. “I’m here to make money. / Wages plus tips / For pouring water into sinking ships,” Frank sings during a work shift that becomes otherworldly, his drunk and gambling customers reaching out to grab him like the desperate souls of the Last Judgment. (Kelleher and the designer Ciarán Bagnall seem to aspire to the Greek-underworld-meets-jazz-joint of Hadestown.)
Luther’s dark descent, on the other hand, doesn’t really get cracked open. There is the menace of Take It on the Chin, which ingeniously conceives each verse as a round in a poker game as it trudges the darkness of gambling, but it doesn’t map Luther’s warp from addiction.
Flannery’s men don’t babble, but they don’t give us enough to know their differences either. What exactly is the contrast between Frank and Luther, two men with plenty going on but expressing little? Such is the restraint of The House Must Win, a musical that feels small for the voices within it.
The House Must Win is at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, until Sunday, May 3rd, then at the Everyman, Cork, from Wednesday, May 6th, until Saturday, May 16th
