ART REVIEW: Just one complaint about Gary’s Félim Ó Flaithulach

(A review by Jackie Hayden)

Perhaps without always appreciating it, we’re surrounded by stories. Not only are television dramas, plays, films, interviews and even news broadcasts and documentaries ultimately based on stories of one kind or another, but most of our daily conversations are too.

But there’s a knack to the art of storytelling, particularly of the fictional kind, that often reaches uncharted heights when we’re taken into the company of a live Irish Seanchai such as Félim Ó Flaithulach (superbly played by Gary Lombard) as he delivers Eamonn Colfer’s new show at Wexford Arts Centre.

Immersed in Colfer’s vivid material, Lombard has the ability to make you feel he’s taking you, and only you, into his confidence as he unfolds enthralling, eccentric, and occasionally ribald, tall stories.

Indeed, Lombard’s approach recalls the all-time great seanchaí Eamon Kelly, with a twinkle in both eyes and a charmingly unhealthy liking for devilment.

He talks about Jaco, a versatile shepherd who trebles as a ballet dancer and a relentless pursuer of women, as if he knew him intimately.

He follows that with a story about a Peeping Tom observing the delectable Rita, the disrobing actress. Could that be a first in the Seanchai tradition?

His final story, ‘The Completionist’, is a little longer than the first two and has a quaint quirkiness a la Flann O’Brien.

It follows the adventures of a man who takes on the job of putting the finishing touches to such supposedly incomplete objects as the Eiffel Tower and the Mona Lisa. As for how he ends up, I’m not telling.

What’s arguably most illuminating about the show is that a truly captivating story needs neither fancy technology nor stage trickery to carry you off to wherever an imaginative writer like Colfer wants to take you.

The equally gifted Lombard was ably supported by harmonica wizard John Murphy who played majestically between stories. Only one complaint. It was too short.