Review: Tales of Ballycumber, Abbey Theatre
Film director Neil Jordan (left) and actor Stephen Rea at the world premiere of 'Tales of Ballycumber' by author and playwright Sebastian Barry on the Abbey stage, running until November 7 as part of the Dublin Theatre festival.
Friday October 09 2009
SEBASTIAN Barry's new play is a lyrical work of great and compelling beauty.
It concerns a friendship between two men. The older, Nicholas Farquhar, played by Stephen Rea in a measured and authoritative way, has a subtle but overwhelming impact on the younger man, Evans, played with guileless directness by Aaron Monaghan. He has come to help get jackdaws out of a chimney.
They are Protestants living in rural Wicklow. Evans loves a Catholic girl, Patsy Byrne, confessing this and thereby eliciting from Nicholas the alarming observation: "You couldn't be trusting a girl like that to be looking after you." The bigotry is extended in a remarkable anti-Catholic diatribe made credible only by Rea's sincerity.
Evans, of normal, bright intelligence otherwise, replies: "You think so?" Then goes on to raise again her "greeny-blue eyes" expressing bewilderment as to how it is possible to tell Catholics by sight. Farquhar says it surely is. They talk of lambs and Pomeranian dogs and other things before parting.
The next morning Evans' father, Andrew, played very movingly by Liam Carney, visits Nicholas with the startling information that Evans shot himself in the stomach the previous evening. He shows Nicholas a suicide note that says "Nicholas Farquhar knows".
He says he will kill the other man if he cannot explain this note. Nicholas has forgotten the bigotry, saying: "Nothing amiss was spoke." While Evans dies this long conversation winds on.
Later there is a grieving to which Nicholas is not invited. Various hints of a darker purpose, possible sexual molestation, the madness of Nicholas who has kept his mother alive in his imagination speaking of her thus, culminate in a surreal visit by Evans' ghost. Nicholas contemplates suicide but decides against.
The setting is springtime, the stage awash with daffodils, the chimney a solitary pillar, the rest of the cottage left to the imagination. It is a powerful story, but seriously flawed in its dramatic logic.
- Bruce Arnold
Irish Independent
