Tough love

A new play at the reopened Belltable Arts Centre in Limerick combines the history of an unchanging city with a musical backdrop – but, says its writer, it’s certainly not a melodrama

EVERYTHING CAN change in two years. That has certainly been the experience of Vincent O'Regan, a character in Mary Coll's new play, Anything But Love, whose first-draft existence in 2008 was as a property developer steeped in affluence and influence – the kind of man who might keep a helicopter idling in his garden.

By the time he staggered into the rehearsal script for the production that sees the grand re-opening of Limerick’s Belltable Arts Centre this week, his fortunes were perhaps more commensurate with those of his nation: a beaten, shamed and chronically dissembling figure.

In almost precisely the same period of time, the Belltable has undergone a radical transformation. In a long and extensive refurbishment, everything bar the O’Connell Street venue’s facade (a listed Georgian structure) has been redeveloped.

But its vast improvements have not come without consequence. Moving to a much smaller off-site space on Cecil Street, the Belltable reduced its capacities shortly after the demise of Island Theatre Company, and there has been a noticeable ebb in Limerick’s theatrical output since – stemmed valiantly by the Belltable’s Limerick Theatre Hub project last year, together with the battling spirit of a new company, Bottom Dog.

Based on Kate O'Brien's 1934 novel, The Ante-Room, a story of an unchanging Limerick – and, by extension, Ireland – in the 1890s, where passion is subjugated to punitive Catholicism, Coll's play might be expected to make some sweeping refurbishments of its own in a theatrical transplantation to 2010. If anything, though, the writer was struck by the story's modernity, which she first encountered as a Masters student of The Social Environment of the Novel.

“If a writer gets you at your formative years, they have you forever,” Coll reflects over lunch with her director Joan Sheehy, who is also the show’s producer.

“You come back to O’Brien at different stages and realise there was a great complexity to her writing, a great courage and hugely modern themes that are dealt with, but hidden, within the framework of a novel in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s. And, to be honest with you, it’s a thumping great story.”

Coll has retained the substance, structure and tone of that story, although some of the names have been changed in the name of plausibility.

Two sisters, Annie and Marie-Rose, are in love with the same man, Vincent, to whom Marie-Rose is married. They are reunited at home in the dying days of their domineering mother, simmering with secrets and tensions stoked by their brother, a dissolute musician with a terminal disease.

The book unfurls over three days – All Saints’ Eve, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day – significant dates to O’Brien’s Agnes, who would leave her passions in the confession booth, but ones that make a dim impression on her modern counterpart Annie, who is now “out of touch with the holy days”, reminded only by her mother’s Polish nurse, Kalena.

“It’s gone,” Coll says of the religion that both sustains and suffocates. “I don’t know many people who make decisions based on the Catholic faith. Emotional relationships haven’t changed. People haven’t changed. They’re the same people they were in 1890. But where’s your moral compass?”

In part, the characters are guided more perceptibly by music. In both O’Brien’s novel and Coll’s play, the brother is a professional musician, allowing for frequent music cues in the drama – a new score was commissioned from composer Micheál Ó Súilleabháin. “In all of Kate O’Brien’s writing, the music is very important,” says Coll. “None of the music that she uses is casual or accidental.”

This also begs the question of whether Coll’s play is naturally a melodrama, combining music and action in a heavy underscoring of emotion and romantic subjects. She is hesitant to agree.

“I don’t think it’s melodramatic at all really. I know you’re talking about melodrama as a form. But it’s about a presence. The journey of the play is taken very much through the script, the dialogue, the characters. The music isn’t there to tug on your heartstrings or pull you forward.” A former director of the Belltable who was prompted to write for drama by the lull in Limerick’s theatre scene, this is Coll’s second play. “I’m Ireland’s oldest, youngest emerging playwright,” she jokes.

After their first collaboration on last year's short Excess Baggage, she is working again with Sheehy, a well recognised actress whose directing career also began two years ago "almost accidentally" when she inherited Buck Jones and the Body Snatchersfrom Island Theatre Company. Sheehy's experience as a performer has helped temper some of Coll's writing. "Mary has a great facility for the sarcastic line, the witty line," says Sheehy warmly, "but the family can't quip at each other all the time. We've had to cut some great lines."

Coll shifts slightly in her seat. “The wonderful thing about having Joan is her measured approach,” she responds. “I could run away completely and she pulls me back. I love a line so much, that even in my personal life I can’t resist saying it.”

There is a music in caustic put-downs too, and it’s a fondness that regularly finds Coll being kicked under the table, she admits. “I really didn’t mean to hurt you deeply,” she will semi-apologise in such circumstances. “But that line was perfect.”

Both Coll and Sheehy agree on one thing, though; the importance of their location. “There’s a wonderful feeling when your own place is shown back to you,” says Coll, “whether that’s in a novel or a work of art, and we haven’t had a huge amount of that in Limerick.”

The changes made to a landmark arts centre, like those made in the adaptation of a landmark novel, are always somewhere between restoration and redevelopment. In this case, though, they have the same intention; to put the arts in Limerick back on the map.

Anything But Loveruns until December 1st at the Belltable Arts Centre in Limerick; belltable.ie