ARE TROUBLES OF SIVE FAR BEHIND US?
It would be nice to think so… but parts of Keane’s 1959 masterwork are jarringly familiar
It would be great if we could say for certain that the story of Sive portrays a situation that faced many young women in the past, but that no longer exists. Alas particular situations, roles and social conditions may have changed, but the position of women as exploitable objects is still alive in an atmosphere of apparent equality: ‘consent’ may be the fashionable word of the moment but what does it really mean in a world where sex à la carte can be the routine charge for a night out and where a refusal is often not easily accepted.
In John B Keane’s play, set in a remote area of Kerry in 1959, Sive, as an orphan schoolgirl, born out of wedlock, is being offered for sale as a wife to ‘a repulsive old corpse of a man’.
She faces a straight choice between continued poverty for her family or the opportunity for her to live on a comfortable farm with grass for 20 cows. The deal would pay her uncle Mike and his wife Mena well, and the girl’s grandmother need not be kept in the house. Straightforward economics.
The drama centres round the practicalities of the set-up and occasional doubts about the morality of such a transaction – behaviour so unacceptable that the Abbey turned the play down in 1959, and Keane had to try it out with the local drama group in Listowel who knew that such situations existed. And the result was a hit that’s still going strong.
The situation is controlled and organised by local matchmaker Thomasheen Seán Rua, who takes charge for a handsome fee. Denis Conway is superb in the role, one of those characters that Keane specialised in: a word-weaving wheeler-dealer who knows how to twist every argument in his own favour and makes everyone who disagrees with him feel inadequate. Thomasheen can be amusing in his persuasive outbursts, but in Conway’s portrayal, he’s also a nasty bit of work for anyone who wants to upset his plans.
His performance is matched by Norma Sheahan as Mena, the woman of the house, a wife corrupted by her restricted role as general dogsbody, forced to cater for her mother-in-law and to look after an orphan with a flawed pedigree, while she herself is childless. And that lack of a family of her own is a weakness probed viciously by grandmother Nanna Glavin (a scathing Fionnula Flanagan). The verbal fisticuffs between the two of them are among the strongest things in the production, Mike (Patrick Ryan) uncle of Sive, carries the moral authority of the play uncomfortably, fighting his own internal battle over his dead sister’s child: he’s burdened by poverty, his wife’s determination to improve her life, and Nanna’s attempts to keep her grand-daughter safe. John Rice’s decent suitor Liam hasn’t a look-in.
Sade Malone as Sive – a happy, outgoing girl, but a piece of valuable property – has the difficult job of keeping cool and suffering quietly while everyone around her is grandstanding.
Steve Wall and Larry Beau as the entertaining duo of travelling tinkers are the voices of sanity, a kind of Greek chorus spelling out the world as it is and as it should be, with Beau giving out his songs at his ‘best’, his ‘mighty best’. And John Olohan’s Seán Dota is a suitably off-putting species of ancient would-be husband who doesn’t quite fit the description of being ‘healthy as a spring salmon’.
Keane’s language is a rich concoction of rural colour, dramatic force and powerful emotion. The second half of the play depends on a contrived, stretched-out situation to bring about a fitting conclusion, but it never loses its dramatic grip.
The set shows a strong prisonlike atmospheric, and director Andrew Flynn keeps everything moving smoothly.
‘Orphan Sive is being offered for sale as a wife to “a repulsive old corpse of a man”’
‘Mena, the woman of the house, corrupted by her restricted role as general dogsbody’