Empathy for a timeless tale sadly lacking
IT'S 35 years since Hugh Leonard's Da was first produced. Even then, it was not a ground-breaking play, merely a damn good one that was destined to stand the test of time.
One of the core qualities that made it so good was the author's bitterness: Hugh Leonard had iron in his soul, and he resented as much as loved the prototypical "little man" who was his father -- the not-at-all disguised Da of the play's title. The piece is a slice of a deeply wounded life, and the fact that most of the wounds were self-inflicted is irrelevant.
So putting Da on stage in 2012 should be a relatively simple matter, particularly in Ireland where audiences can meet the characters' children and grandchildren on the street any day of the week. No flights of fancy or imagination are required from director or cast, just empathy with the work and plenty of professional talent.
There is plenty of professional talent on display on the Gate's stage in the theatre's new production of the play, but unfortunately the empathy is missing. There's a black hole in the place where you should allow yourself to be swept along by the sentimentality, shedding tears instead of shaking your head in exasperated distaste at the self-indulgence.
Stuart Graham is Charlie/ Hugh, the writer home from London to bury Da and clear out the tiny local authority house -- only to find that the ghosts of father, mother, and the totality of childhood are rampaging around the room. But you can't believe in this Charlie: Graham fails to connect with what are supposed to be his own resentful memories of fretful insecurity.
It leaves the core flailing because there is little for Owen Roe in the title role and Ingrid Craigie as Ma to pitch their portrayals against. Despite this, both deliver magnificently in terms of credibility, while Tadhg Murphy is excellently tentative as Charlie in adolescence and young manhood. And John Kavanagh repeats with the ease of long practice his portrayal of Drumm, the mentor Charlie despised and resented (for no particular reason) long after he had moved away from his influence. Indeed, Kavanagh is at last the right age for the part.
The rest of the acting is pretty awful: a caricature Oliver from Stephen Swift; a non-presence in a flowered dress, leadenly reciting lines, from Rebecca Grimes as the supposedly flamboyant sexual tease the "yellow peril"; and Deirdre Monaghan looking and sounding more like a housekeeper than her employer as Mrs Prynne. Admittedly Leonard's detestation of his father's old employers, and his own confusion of envy and contempt for protestant/Quaker abhorrence of any kind of flashiness (middle class and educated) means she can never be fully convincing.
Ben Stones has designed an unsuitably spacious-seeming set more reminiscent of a run-down farm kitchen than the tiny environs of a 1940s city corporation house. And all these faults, sadly, make one wonder what director Toby Frow thought he was doing.
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Two years on from its premiere, Bernard Farrell's Bookworms is already getting predictable reactions at the Abbey. He's accustomed to them: the insecure and pretentious (the people he writes about in his plays) are slamming it as slight rubbish, as they've slammed all of the plays that have made a nice little living for Farrell since he burst on the playwriting scene more than 30 years ago.
The people who look at our society with any degree of clarity once again pinch themselves, blushing and sighing as they recognise just how nasty and idiotic we can be in our silly strivings to advance ourselves in the tiny world that is middle Ireland -- and indeed middle anywhere.
Bookworms is set in Ann and Larry's suburban living room, where Ann is hosting her book club for the first time. It's also the first time the fellas have been allowed attend and when recession insecurities surface as alcohol takes hold, mayhem and nastiness ensue, which even Jennifer, schoolmistress and all-round intellectually pretentious bossy-boots, can't control.
Nor can she control her edgy banker husband, just as gentle, soppy Ann can't really control her Larry, successful builder broken down to local handyman. Then there's Dorothy, comfortable financially since her husband died, with a penchant for collecting other people's secrets. And outside it all is 18-year-old Aisling, skype-ing from Australia where she has wisely escaped for her gap year.
Jim Culleton's production follows his previous success very closely, with the same cast giving him sterling service, although Donna Dent replaces Karen Egan as the ghastly Jennifer: Dent makes her slightly less unpleasant, but even more stupid, and it works terrifically.
But whether it needs a bit more re-rehearsal or not, I'm not sure, but the second half does need to hang together a bit more smoothly.
- EMER O'KELLY
Originally published in
