Tea in a China Cup
Lyric Theatre, Belfast
★★★★☆
First seen making burial arrangements for her terminally ill mother, Beth, the 30-year-old at the centre of Christina Reid’s knockout comedy, is already anticipating the worst. She wasn’t expecting the purchase of a grave to be so complicated. “Why is the cemetery segregated?” she asks.
In this Northern Ireland of the early 1970s, one half of the cemetery is Catholic and the other is Protestant. “The council decided to make it official?” Beth (Amy Molloy) asks about a division that happened naturally. (“The people sort of segregated it themselves,” the clerk explains.)
Lifestyle differences between Protestants and Catholics are now pop-cultural zingers: the observations of Derry Girls – “Catholics really buzz off statues” – feel permitted after the passage of decades. But when the clerk of Tea in a China Cup explains a peculiar Protestant hang-up about needing a plot near the cemetery wall, Reid (who died in 2015) is mining the same source in 1983, during the stressful years of the Troubles.
Reid’s comedy is a send-up of mid-century diehard unionism. Beth arrives home to a sick mother, Sarah (Mary Moulds), who is obsessed with living long enough to see the flute bands in the Orange march.
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In flashbacks 20 years earlier, Beth’s grandmother (Marie Jones) and great-aunt (Katie Tumelty) list differences between communities. Catholics, we hear, are bad at black-leading fireplaces, refuse to clean their front steps and have so many babies because they’re “greedy”. Protestants have a thing for linens and insist on bone-china tea sets (to be displayed in cabinets, not used).
The younger generation are doing things differently. Beth takes an alternative path into womanhood, one building a friendship with a Catholic girl, Theresa (Louise Parker), during the years leading up to the onset of the Troubles.
Tea in a China Cup is often associated with a flinty realism, but the Belfast of Dan Gordon’s revival at the Lyric Theatre resembles a storybook – one that looks dipped in tar, its black Victorian terraced houses lit up in white and purple fluorescents. It presents the play as a comedy, one leaping through a dark history.
Reid’s breakout is well-established theatre lore: a 40-year-old divorced single mother reinventing herself as a playwright, putting a story mirroring her own family tree into art.
It’s remarkably emphatic for a debut play, hungrily pulling at levers. Its structure moves fluidly, like a Tennessee Williams memory play; an admired china tea set foreshadows an attractive but futile marriage; and a long-arc joke about HG Well’s The Invisible Man becomes a diss of a bad husband.
The sad irony is that the play’s only men who aren’t deserters and heartless are those who go to war (Beth comes from a British-army family), but Tea in a China Cup stirs most when its women come to each other’s aid. During the army’s first big raid of the Troubles, a protective Beth stays put with her mother and makes a decision that feels defiant in its normality. “I’ll make a cup of tea,” she says.
Tea in a China Cup is at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, until Saturday, May 30th
