TAKEABOW, ALL INVOLVED
Comedy is the winner in this gem about actors on the road
‘The production is full of beautifully played individual performances’
Drama At Inish Abbey Theatre, Dublin Until January 24 ★★★★★
In less academic times, the best, indeed the only, training for actors was supplied by the fit-ups, those theatrical groups that hauled themselves around the country, bringing classic drama and comedy to the provinces. It was a tough life where nobody got wealthy, the living sure wasn’t easy and glamour was in short supply. Actors were overworked, venues and digs were often second-rate, stage lighting could be positively dangerous, management could run out of money, and then it was on to another town. But it was a great training, although television would eventually put an end to most of it. Amid all the tribulations, the actor-managers usually preserved an aura of majestic dignity.
That’s the background to Lennox Robinson’s Drama at Inish, first performed in 1933. This production claims to be set in the 1960s, though there’s not much evidence of it, apart from some elaborate liberties taken in the costume department for comic effect.
A small Co. Cork town is brought to life by the arrival of Hector de la Mare and his repertory company bringing the gloomy themes of Chekov, Ibsen and Strindberg to the locals, provoking depression in the locality, inept suicide attempts, domestic upheaval and re-awakening the heartaches of the lovelorn. The play is directed by Cal McCrystal who has a genius for physical comic invention that brings great energy to the proceedings.
The production is littered with the niceties of fine comic detail. Particularly good is McCrystal’s use of activity outside the main hotel window, where passers-by contend with the weather, and gawping characters create havoc with the first rehearsal in the hotel, in cameos that were reminiscent of the heyday of silent cinema.
It’s a comedy with serious undertones, that can easily fall into farce, and the opening section sets the tone by going solidly for laughs at all costs. There was a big contrast between it and the next section where serious local issues kicked in, the comedy was more low key, and characters who were initially a hoot became suddenly serious. It seemed as if McCrystal was temporarily taking a slightly different angle to suggest a rural Ireland with its own emotional problems, that has nothing to learn from European gloom and doom.
By the second half, the balance was firmly struck between the comic and the serious. And the comedy takes over triumphantly. This is a production aimed at pure entertainment. And it’s a gem of a play for actors.
Hector de la Mare might have been specially written for Nick Dunning. He imposes himself on the stage with a nicely controlled grandiose thespian pretension, and yet his second-act speech about the reality of the travelling player’s life is quite moving in its pathetic depiction of thwarted ambition. Marion O’Dwyer as Hector’s sozzled, pretentious wife Constance Constantia, played for laughs and got them with every heave of her amplified bosom.
Mark O’Regan’s hotel owner is an energetic paragon of unctuous managerial smarminess until brutal pragmatism takes over when the actors bring notoriety to the town and his wife (Helen Norton) lets her expenses get out of hand. The production is full of beautifully played individual performances, from Ian O’Reilly’s delightfully naïve audition as a local would-be actor, to Marcus Lamb’s TD, unfailingly loyal to the party until Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People alarms his conscience.
And the ensemble work from the cast of 13 makes the most of the comic opportunities.
The panto Aladdin, that opened at the Gaiety, Dublin, this week, has been extended to January 19.
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