The Cure

Half Moon Theatre Cork

With the auditorium lit by hangover blue, Conal Creedon’s direction of this short one-man play is an exercise in mood, memory and, to a degree this performance makes significant, metaphor.

The “cure” of the title is more than it seems: this is not just a search for a “hair of the dog” to alleviate a post-batter pre- Christmas melancholy. Instead it unfolds like a threnody, a lament infected by toxic self-pity and, for a while, encumbered by the need to shift guilt onto the tolerant shoulders of history.

Our friendly drunk, fixed by the wide disillusioned eyes of Aidan O’Hare, navigates a city only familiar in folklore. This is Creedon territory in effect; just as so many buildings have disappeared and so many alleyways are re-named, so also the language of evocation is an argot rarely heard and almost foreign; who now goes for “a scove” or on the rantan? Who is “boiled from drink” or remembers the fishy stench from The Baltimore Stores? Such phrases, like the gleeful evocation of the early hours pub near Fr Mathew Street, contain a humour as localised as the place-names themselves.

Geography and history together over- burden the piece, despite the satiric bite of its “new” society and despite also the skill with which O’Hare, using his overcoat like a vampire’s cloak, conjures up the personalities of his past. Among these, and now heading his way, is the malevolent school-room figure of Brother Keenan. It is in the conjunction of what is remembered and what is now approaching, and in O’Hare’s wondrously compassionate depiction of the aging teacher, that the play reveals its promise, and its power, of transformation.

Until April 29th