LOTS TO LOVE IN THIS SPARKLING TEAM EFFORT
Nancy Harris’s inventive play asks what we really know about romance (oh, and it’s great fun too!)
W‘Almost every important character gets a personality going-over’
e don’t really understand anything about love or about anyone, including ourselves. That’s a hopelessly inadequate summary of Nancy Harris’s witty, wildly imaginative crackerjack of a new play that challenges hilariously all our ideas about relationships and everything else we thought we understood.
It’s based on the cry of the pathetic Blanche du Bois in Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire, ‘I don’t want realism, I want magic’.
It’s what Casey (Eimear Keating) has found in her new romance: love at first sight with Brett (Cameron Cuffe), a young man she knows nothing about. He has found exactly the same in her. And he’s everything a family could hope for: handsome, courteous, successful, home-loving, you name it.
It’s nuts say her parents, her sister Cynthia (Danielle Galligan) and everyone who knows anything about love. Casey has always had a serious mental problem, so she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But then, just how strong is Cynthia’s marriage? Almost every important character gets a personality goingover, a lot of it delivered as sparkling physical comedy. There’s no hiding place for priggish superiority.
This might all be routine stuff, but the production doesn’t stop at dialogue. It uses dance, song, music, satire and everything in the theatrical trade to pile on the entertainment. The huge stage space is surrounded by long sparkling tinsel, furniture comes and goes, there’s and a revolving stage.
There’s some satirical send-up of the theatrical world and its pretences. Stephen Brennan is there as a combined guru and world-weary theatrical agent/producer, pronouncing advice and criticism in the best profound tones of lordly theatricals.
The theme and tone of the play are set immediately with a young boy appearing in school dressed lavishly as Cleopatra, admonished by an ultra-correct and imperious headmaster Donnacha O’Dea. When Casey and Brett go to Paris, there’s a song and dance routine satirising the cliched image of Gay Paree.
Will their marriage ever take place? There’s enough probing and temptation to expose even the most upright characters.
The final scenes contain a brilliantly choreographed bust-up, before returning to a cleverly conceived revival of the opening scene that sums up beautifully the whole thesis of the play, all kept going at rapid pace by director Wayne Jordan. But this is clearly a great team effort between the performers, designers, make-up people and all the crew.