Sisters just not savage enough
Fifteen women on stage, with no men, apart from the unseen Owen Roe in recorded snippets. That’s the Abbey’s reply to last year’s ruckus about the lack of opportunity for women. Deirdre Kinihan’s play, set in the sixties, is the Irish version of Les Belles-Soeurs by French-Canadian writer Michel Tremblay, written in 1965. The 15 women crowded into Ger Lawless’s flat in Ballymun are there to help Ger (Marion O’Dwyer) stick a million Green Shield stamps, which she has won, into booklets. And with those stamps, the equivalent of today’s bonus points, she can claim prizes beyond her wildest dreams.
The play is a satire on the hypocrisy of Catholic Ireland in the sixties. And there’s a lot to savage: poverty, the tough life led by women, their low expectations, marital cruelty, shotgun weddings, the scar of illegitimacy, and the persistence of self-interest Civil War politics that was subservient to history or the bishops.
Strangely though, the politicians barely come into the picture, and the play takes a long time to gel into a unit.
The women in Ger’s flat bring their hidden jealousies, resentments and hard luck stories with them. They inhabit a fantasy world about big wins in competitions and if Ger’s win offers temptation, they won’t let their religious convictions get in the way. Occasionally individuals step outside the group to air their individual grievances in monologues, and the joy of bingo, among other things, gets a celebratory choral speech.
There’s some impressive writing in places, but the raucous dialogue and interplay, especially in the overlong first half, that’s meant to be hilarious, is too often just tedious: the women fall on their knees to say the Angelus, one of them sprays holy water at the mention of contraception and they’re pathetically shockable. I felt some of it was patronising towards the women of Ballymun. As I remember it, there was a great deal of open debate about contraception in the sixties, but politicians generally kept out of it.
The second half is an improvement and much tougher, with powerful speeches by Karen Ardiff, Lisa Lambe and Caoimhe O’Malley on subjects like exploitation, brutality and abortion. They’re aimed at showing the hidden lives of the 15 women, but these are subjects for in-depth treatment; as additions to the Green Shield capers they almost become stand-alone political statements.
The chorus of Amhrán na bhFhiann at the end, however, is a great ironic summing-up of the contrast between the public and private faces of the country.
‘The interplay, that’s meant to be hilarious, is too often just tedious’