Plenty of talent on stage but easy laughs undermine the
THEATRE THE CHASTITUTE GAIETY THEATRE, DUBLIN
John B Keane’s 1980 play gets a revival with a cast of familiar faces from a variety of TV shows. The play is a bit dated, and Keane’s bawdy challenge to a prudish society no longer has the boundary-pushing feel of its original time.
It describes in terrifying terms the fate of Irish bachelor farmers, bullied by the church to associate women with shame and condemned to live drink-fuelled, loveless lives. Set in the 1960s, John Bosco McLaine (Stephen Brennan) is the bachelor in question, who has several unlucky encounters with women.
Director Michael Scott doesn’t bring enough weight to the production early on, so when it turns serious towards the end, the tonal shift doesn’t work.
Brennan goes for all the easy laughs, and we are expected to laugh along with him as he gets into a lot of high-octane scrapes with women — there is no sense of his tragedy. The priests aren’t scary, just funny. Towards the end, the production grasps at some of the epic potential, but alas, too late. There is plenty of talent on the stage, John Olohan and Brendan Conroy give hilarious life to the rakish Brady and the tricky matchmaker Molloy.
There are super cameos from Catherine Byrne, Sorcha Furlong and Maria McDermottroe.
But you underplay the darkness in Keane at your peril and in pursuing the easy laugh, you undermine the deeper joke. As Samuel Beckett said, nothing is funnier than unhappiness. Running until May 20 – Katy Hayes
THEATRE MAZ AND BRICKS PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
Maz and Bricks comes at a particularly timely moment: it debuted just days after the Citizen’s Assembly voted overwhelmingly to allow abortion in Ireland. Fishamble’s latest play tells the story of Maz (Eva O’Connor), a young woman attending a pro-choice march, and Bricks (Stephen Jones), a Tallaght father on his way to pick up his four-year-old daughter. The two meet on the Luas, and form an unlikely bond.
Maz and Bricks variously
challenge each other in bristly conversation and speak to the audience in rhyming monologues.
And yet, they seem to be in different plays. O’Connor, who wrote the play, gives Jones all the best lines, and he easily steals the show.
Maz, by contrast, is far less engaging. She has two modes: snapping rage or histrionic misery, and comes across as deeply unsympathetic, relying on an inevitably tragic backstory.
O’Connor has a powerful skill for delivering searing monologues, but the success of the play rests on the strength of the two characters and there is a striking imbalance.
Maree Kearns’ set is spare, a spread of tiered platforms with neon underlighting. It can make the space seem more dynamic, but the sound and lighting act as cues rather than giving any real sense of where in the city the scene takes place.
The play is ultimately let down by a disappointingly convenient ending, but Jones’ performance alone is worth the ticket price.
Running until May 13 – Meadhbh McGrath