NOVEL IDEA
FAILS TO TRANSLATE FROM PAGE TO STAGE Claudia Carroll’s book-adapted play on family misfortunes is over-written and over-acted
THE SHOW CRIES OUT FOR GENUINE DRAMATIC EXCHANGES’
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C laudia Carroll has won a deserved name for herself as an actress (a long-running stint in RTÉ’s Fair City among other roles) and she has sold novels by the truck-load. I haven’t read the novel on which this play is based, but the resultant 80 minutes of over-acted, over-written family misfortunes, didn’t act as a recommendation for the original. It started well but collapsed into mawkish sentimental melodrama.
The adaptation, by Claudia Carroll herself, is written as a series of interwoven monologues for three women, each with recognisable problems. The inspiration for the story comes from Eleanor Roosevelt’s dictum that, ‘A woman is like a tea bag, You never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.’ If only the play had even one remark half as memorable as that.
The three women are Susan (Clelia Murphy), distraught and demented by the loss of her eldest daughter through drugs. She blames a local boy, and stalks him night and day, shouting abuse at him and becoming a menace.
Her daughter Melissa (Megan McDonnell) suffers as a result, left on her own, miserable, bullied at school and inflicting self-harm on herself. Her father, a soldier serving abroad, is kind and lovable.
Feisty next-door neighbour Jayne (Marion O’Dwyer) widowed, in her sixties, is all heart and helpful, and has picked up an online American lover, Eric, who comes to visit, temporarily reviving her lonely sexless life. Her married son Jason would like her to get out of the house.
Because the story is not well dramatised, individual speeches are loaded with information about everything that’s going on, and about everyone in the district with occasional accents thrown in for dramatic effect. And the monologues are not just loaded with painful experiences, they’re emoted at high-powered emotional level. Listening to some of the weeping and wailing I couldn’t help thinking of John Gielgud’s advice to actors overdoing it, that if they weep, the audience won’t. It’s the problem with the long monologues that they leave little room for the audience to work out anything for themselves.
And the other characters referred to, are generally stereotypes who talk in clichés.
There’s the nasty old female neighbour with nothing good to say about anyone, and a mental health worker who labours through the seven stages of grief.
Eric, Jayne’s new pony-tailed lover is a sharp player on the stock exchange, and an over-the-top vegan who indulges in past life regression therapy. The affair is highly unlikely but Eric has great possibilities for humour. The role needs a nuanced performance from an actor, not just second-hand accounts. The kindly Jayne is given a lot of expletiveladen language that’s meant to be funny but is just crude.
There are comic possibilities too in the contrast between accounts of the hot-shot financier Eric, and Jayne’s chip van entrepreneur son, but the comic timing needed to make it work is missing. The show cries out for genuine dramatic exchanges with more subtle delivery. One-man, one-woman shows can be gripping given the right material. This dramatisation is overloaded for a cast of three.