The Lilly Lally Show

Bewley’s Café Theatre, Dublin

IT IS not the shadow of Mary Moone, celebrated variety star who stands before us on the stage, but the real-life faded figure of the star. With a too-black wig, false eyelashes and a painted red smile, she brings the spirit of her most famous creation Winnie the Waitress to the stage, but there is desperation in her address to the audience: a need for affirmation; not just for the role she plays on stage but the one she plays in real life. “I don’t do auditions,” she repeats, as if she needs to remind herself and not us of her stature.

From the poignant tone of Mark O’Halloran’s restrained production, this might very well be her last performance; a final swansong for a life lived on the stage.

Hugh Leonard’s melancholic script is laced with mordant humour, and as she remembers favourite old jokes and crowd pleasers, there is charm as well as pathos in Moone’s mournful memories. The world of the variety show is populated by larger-than-life midgets and depressed comedians, by deep friendships and rivalries, by the affirmation of nightly applause and the early morning negation of self-doubt and regret.

In the story of Cecil, the “clapaholic”, who taught her her greatest tricks, we find a metaphor for the brokenness at the heart of this actor who cannot survive without the audience’s applause.

Standing in front of Jack Kirwan’s deliberately two-dimensional painted scenery, Barbara Brennan brings a held-back quality to Moone’s monologue confessional.

In the words of Mary Moone, Brennan “knows how to hold a dramatic pause”, and she uses Moone’s jokes as a bulwark against self-revelation, suspending the moments of disclosure in Moone’s monologue just long enough to evoke her reluctance without sacrificing tension.

Indeed Brennan’s emotional deferral is crucial to achieving the power of the play’s final moments, where Mary Moone steps into the spotlight and takes off her wig, revealing both the artifice of her bravado performance and the deception at the heart of the theatre itself. Until September 11