The bitter draught that is self-pity
Emer O’Kelly is underwhelmed by some over-written, drawn-out angst
Flight Project Arts Centre, Dublin Howie the Rookie Viking Theatre, Clontarf, Dublin
ONE gets the impression that John O’Donovan is so consumed with sympathy for and identification with his three characters in Flight that he believes every syllable, breath, cough and stutter is so deeply significant and valuable that it must be spelled out at almost pitiless length.
And that does his play no favours: it is grossly over-written, and feels much longer than its two-and-a-half-hour duration. The premise is that three men in their early thirties gather in a derelict building outside Ennis in Co Clare on the 17th anniversary of the death of their friend in a traffic accident on a half-built by-pass. It may have been a drunken accident on his part and that of the driver, now a well-known local figure; or the driver may have been only the instrument: the victim may have deliberately walked in front of the car.
Now the three friends — Barry, an air traffic controller about to leave Ennis to accompany his girlfriend to London where she has found a good job; Cusack, married to the daughter of the local multi-millionaire/ self-made man (what used to be called a gombeen man); and Pa, who has fallen off even the town’s limited bandwagon, and is jobless and homeless — are determined on a commemoration. The commemoration involves drinking themselves senseless and intermittently getting stoned while they blame that night 17 years earlier for everything in their lives that has disappointed them.
O’Donovan implies in his programme note that the requirement to have a job destroys young men, and is largely responsible for the high male suicide rate. He creates characters whom he obviously pities deeply for their limited horizons, and believes it all to be the fault of capitalism. He hopes on their behalf, he writes, that they never forgive the “economics that has left them behind”.
Long before the global (and Irish) economic crash and the unbridled rise of neo-liberal economic theories, there was another generation equally resentful and dissatisfied. They were called the Flower Children. Old and grey now, they have survived, self-pity behind them. AKA maturity.
Unfortunately, O’Donovan doesn’t just write immature characters: his premise seems immature. And one’s sympathy for these disillusioned men and their rage becomes extremely strained as all three are “credited” with dropping out of school, or idling their way to exam failure.
Thomas Martin directed this One Duck production somewhat leadenly, in a over-stylised set. The cast is Colin Campbell, Conor Madden and Rhys Dunlop. It will transfer to the Omnibus Theatre in London.
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The last time Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie was staged in Ireland was six years ago by Landmark, when the author directed, and cast Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as both The Howie Lee and The Rookie Lee (no relation), a leap of faith that was more than justified. But the 2006 production in the Peacock with Aidan Kelly and the late Karl Shiels is probably the definitive one.
The play is 20 years old now, and has been given a new production at the Viking by Glass Mask. Stephen Jones is The Howie Lee and Rex Ryan The Rookie Lee. Both men play to their physical strengths, with Jones’s burly form disintegrating into shattered stillness following his cocky strutting as he joins the planned beating of The Rookie; and Ryan, slight and smaller, almost vainglorious in his certainty of conning his way out of the ultimate in gangland trouble. (Gangland savagery in 2010 had not assumed today’s horror; but the outcome was as final.)
O’Rowe’s language remains as terrible in its force as ever, sickening in its descriptive power of a world closeted in its own viciousness. But his real strength lies in the absurdity of the triggers: The Rookie is to be beaten up because he is believed to have infected the violent Peaches with scabies, following a drunken sharing of a filthy mattress. And The Howie becomes responsible for his baby brother’s death because he chooses to join Peaches… with the hope of “getting his hole” along the way.
Neil Flynn spares nothing in his direction, and the production is viscerally irresistible.