'Little Gem' sparkles in the extended family of monologues

CULTURE SHOCK: IT IS STRIKING that of the three plays currently on at the two Dublin mainstream theatres, the Abbey and the Gate, two are made up of monologues and the other is by a writer who made his reputation on monologue-based drama, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

Brian Friel's Faith Healer, at the Gate, is the progenitor of the trend, a genuinely great play whose influence has often been baleful. The Abbey has The Seafarerby Conor McPherson which, though it moves beyond monologues, has one very long speech that is a virtual monologue in itself.

And Elaine Murphy's Little Gem, currently at the Peacock, has a simplified version of the Faith Healerstructure – three interrelated characters taking turns to speak directly to the audience. There is, indeed, a feeling of generational succession, with the form passing from Friel to McPherson and from McPherson to Murphy.

Nor is this situation a mere accident of programming. It reflects, on the one hand, the economics of theatre in more straitened times – monologue-based plays tend to have very small casts and simple sets. It is also a mark, on the other hand, of a retreat in much contemporary Irish drama from the large-scale enactment of conflicts that embody the greater tensions of social change.

In the case of Little Gem, however, dismay at seeing yet another talented new playwright going down the safe monologue route is tempered by the sense that Murphy's project is rather more ambitious than it seems. On the surface, Little Gemlives up to its title as a small, if glittering, display of emergent stagecraft. Paul Meade's production (for Gúna Nua and the Civic Theatre) could hardly be simpler – three women, ranked in ascending ages from left to right, sit on chairs facing the audience. Although the poster shows them laughing in bed together, each in fact remains within her own space, with no direct contact between them.

The emerging narrative is also simple. There is none of the tension of Faith Healer, in which the stories told by the three actors contradict as well as complement each other. Nor are there the shifts of register between the mundane and the Gothic that McPherson can deploy so brilliantly in his monologues. Murphy plays with a straight bat – her narrators are not postmodern tricksters but are rather of the old-fashioned reliable variety.

Comparing Little Gemto another play with three monologues for women in Gúna Nua's repertoire, Mark O'Rowe's Crestfall, is like comparing pure and gentle snowfall to dirty slush and treacherous ice.

Yet it is in its very simplicity that the force of Murphy’s play lies. If there is a case for the monologue in the theatre it is that there are some voices that need to be heard directly, some characters who should be allowed to speak for themselves. This directness is always an illusion, of course – everything on a stage is mediated by conventions and expectations. But there is considerable craft in the construction of this illusion. It requires a writer who does not seem to be writing and actors who do not seem to be acting. And both Murphy and the excellent cast – Anita Reeves as the 60-something Kay, Hilda Fay as her 40-ish daughter Lorraine and Sarah Greene as Lorraine’s late teenage daughter Amber – achieve this feat in considerable style.

Murphy's writing may be simple, but it is far from naive. It is reminiscent to some degree of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, with the same ear for the rhythms of ordinary speech, the same relish for the surreal elements of quotidian existence, the same mix of constrained form and broad sexual humour, the same ability to dance on the edge of sentimentality without falling over it and the same all-embracing compassion for the characters.

Where the ambition lies is in the territory that Murphy occupies. It is, unashamedly, that of what is often wrongly dismissed as chick lit, the struggles for love and against loneliness of recognisable women. The yearning for love is the note that sounds through Kay’s engagement with the decline of her beloved husband, through Lorraine’s attempts to deal with her drug-addicted former husband and her hopeful affair with a new man, and through Amber’s attempts to make sense of her unplanned baby and abandonment by its father. So far, so much par for the course.

But Murphy doesn’t just occupy this territory, she transforms it. She clears out all the trappings of lifestyle signifiers – the brand names here are J Cloths, not Jaeger, and John Player Blue rather than Jimmy Choo. Murphy’s women, as she puts it, are “hardworking, not particularly rich or poor, ignored by the Celtic Tiger”. They are neither idealised salt-of-the-earth types nor mere pegs on which to hang social problems. And each of them seems equally real – Murphy moves deftly up and down the age register. Unlike the typical chick lit story, hers does not discriminate, in terms of the yearning for both sex and love, between the young and the old. And her grasp of language and detail is up to the task of switching seamlessly between 18 and 65.

If we had often heard these voices before on the Irish stage, the directness and simplicity of Murphy's monologues might not have the same potency. But the fact is that we have not. Irish theatre doesn't have much of a place for ordinariness – and even less for female ordinariness. The formal limitations of Little Gemmatter less than Murphy's successful marriage of popular comedy and hard-edged realism and the vividness with which she brings undramatic lives to life.

If the monologue form provides a safe landing place for her leap of imagination in putting these women on the stage, so be it. With her obvious talent, and the confidence that ought to follow the success of Little Gem, she may not need such a soft landing in the future. She may find a way to make her characters not just touch the audience but, as they do in the poster, actually touch each other.