Abbey set up is played forlaughs
It’s 1904, the year in which Joyce set Ulysses, and in which WB Yeats, Lady Gregory and their nationalist supporters set up The Abbey. Dublin By Lamplight, first produced in 2004, is a commemoration of that year – with a difference. It’s a laugh-aloud, rollicking send-up of theatrical pretentiousness and political bombast, an extravagant piece of comic invention mixing reality with fiction as the founders of the pioneering National Theatre of Ireland prepare to stage their mythological epic, The Wooing Of Emer, misspelt in their poster as The Wowing Of Emer.
The performers all wear masklike make-up, in the style of commedia dell’arte, in which the actors represent types, rather than full characters, using an elaborate silent-screen technique.
There’s a role here for the dying Cúchulainn and a Maud Gonnelike figure (Karen Egan in super melodramatic mode), trumpeting her band of female revolutionaries – labelled with a nice ungrammatical touch, Na Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and a flowery caricature of Oscar Wilde (Paul Reid) as a wildly self-obsessed actor, ‘too long in the game to let a firstnight disaster get him down’. And in the middle of it all is Maggie, a character who could have walked out of an O’Casey play, ready to grasp her chance to move from costume girl to acting fame.
Trying desperately to launch the new show and overcome government suspicions is the impoverished Willie (a delightfully light-footed Louis Lovett), a kind of third-division WB Yeats.
His job is complicated by his revolutionary brother, due to play the dying Cúchulainn, but distracted by his plan to blow up the visiting King Edward VII with a home-made bomb.
The play is full of comic wordplay and theatrical in-jokes, and the play-within-a-play has some hilariously cod mythical language, not to mention a snatch of When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.
The style works brilliantly in the farcical first half but not so well in the second – when brutal reality encroaches too much on the lampooning – but despite that Dublin By Lamplight remains a genuine nugget of theatrical wit, with outstanding performances by the cast of six, including Caitríona Ennis, Gus McDonagh and Colin Campbell, all doubling and trebling roles with breathtaking skill, speed and apparently ridiculous ease.
‘A genuine nugget of theatrical wit that boasts a number of fine performances’