Adelphi ’63
Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
In one scene of Laura Brady’s zippy feelgood comedy, two teenage girls gathered at a wireless listen to a noodly trad song that’s almost offensive in its politeness. Its title is even unclear about whether it intends to uplift or pacify all who listen: Oh, What a Lovely Girl You Are (Indeed, You Are a Lovely Girl).
This being 1963, a revolution is just around the corner. We hear the radio presenter announce a competition to win tickets to the concert of the decade: The Beatles at the Adelphi Cinema in Dublin. In the catharsis of Beatlemania, girls could listen to a handsome 21-year-old Paul McCartney swoon over his girlfriend on I Saw Her Standing There.
Long before the frozen queues and purgatorial waiting rooms of Ticketmaster, Mary, a pop superfan played by Brady herself, takes a similarly labyrinthine path. “I couldn’t afford the price of a ticket, so I’ll pray for one,” she says, hitting all the Masses from Ringsend to Rialto, chanting her way through a list of recipients that includes St Patrick and Holy Thérèse of the Little Flowers.
Mary seems free to zigzag the city, getting into trouble as she goes. Her cousin Brigid (a sharp Jessica Dunne Perkins), on the other hand, works in a sewing factory to help her unemployed mother. She has grown distant, no longer dancing to the radio, and is heard crying in the bathroom at night
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That’s sad when the magic of Brady’s play is how popular music and culture bring the girls together. A flashback shows them in their kitchen dancing to Eydie Gormé’s Blame it on the Bossa Nova with hip shakes and flying feet. They re-enact scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and impersonate Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.
Any presumptions of a grey, dull premodern Dublin are dispelled in the lustrous city of this staging by Emma Finegan, director of the Dublin Fringe Festival hit Don’t Tell Dad About Diana.
Brady’s Mary is certainly the bigger pop fan. We see her dancing the twist, swivelling against the sounds of Jailhouse Rock. Her Beatles knowledge may be surprisingly lacking – she doesn’t know which one is the drummer, for instance, and seems more focused on the differences between their hairstyles – but she knows what she needs to know. The young female fans who propelled Beatlemania were finally allowed to scream their desires out loud. (“Ringo Starr! He’s massive!” Mary says.)
As Mary drags a reluctant Brigid – dressed chicly in a houndstooth trench coat and rain bonnet by the production’s costume designer, Mae Leahy – to the Adelphi, the difficulties of the past come into play, particularly the secrets and desperation of women in a shamingly Catholic Ireland.
But female friendship is not so easily destructible in Brady’s comedy, which is staged by Smock Alley – now Dublin’s municipal theatre – and the up-and-coming producer Muirenn Lyons. The Beatles concert is presented as a temporary refuge. Among groups of girls hugging each other during She Loves You, Mary and Brigid finally join them, becoming part of something bigger.
Adelphi ’63 is at Smock Alley, Dublin, until Sunday, May 3rd
