NOT TOO KEANE ON TALE OF SEXUAL FRUSTRATION
Fine lead performance fails to salvage a repetitive story
John B Keane was obviously angry when he wrote this play in 1980. Angry with the plight of lonely farmers cowed sexually by Church dogma on sexuality, and living lonely lives of loveless frustration, unable to find wives or even have casual flings.
Anger has its uses in giving a play emotional power but it runs the risk of taking over and becoming a lecture instead of a drama. And that’s the problem with The Chastitute – (Keane’s word for the exact opposite of a prostitute). Set in the late Sixties, it falls halfway between being an amusing farce about the misfiring attempts by Kerry farmer John Bosco McLaine to get a woman into bed, and being a serious look at social isolation and sexual repression. Contraception, a major issue at the time, is never mentioned.
Poverty, living in isolated places or sharing a house into late middle age were often the reasons men and women ended up single and frustrated. But John Bosco doesn’t seem to share these disadvantages. He’s been given sexual hang-ups from hell-fire sermons at the missions, but he’s apparently pretty well off and doesn’t seem to live in a particularly isolated place. Nor has he been short of access to women, but he’s a peculiarly gauche specimen, totally lacking in any of the social graces. He wants a sensible wife but hasn’t a clue how to go about it.
The play is poorly structured. There are some good comic scenes, but in general it’s a plotless series of failed sexual exploits that are repetitive and progressively less humorous. These are linked by the main character addressing the audience directly as a narrator, and it all finally disintegrates into an orchestrated tirade of anger.
The whole thing is held together by Stephen Brennan’s superb performance as the gullible, guilt-laden John Bosco, ‘a willing acolyte of the whoremaster Sylvester Brady’.
Brendan Conroy’s wheedling, word-weaving matchmaker is an instantly recognisable Keane creation, his language of love solidly based on farmyard imagery, and John Olohan plays the silvertongued sharpster Sylvester with oily finesse. However, the director Michael Scott regularly goes in for overkill in spelling things out, particularly the crass idea of having an huge crucifix hanging over the stage in the confession scenes, presumably to emphasise the overwhelming power of the Church. Ironically, the confessional priest (Mark O’Regan) is an amusing, reasonable character, himself fed up with the emphasis on sexual indoctrination.
And ultimately, despite John B Keane’s inimitable wordplay being as good as ever, as a play this simply doesn’t compare with his best work.
MICHAEL MOFFATT SHOW OF THE WEEK The Chastitute Gaiety Theatre Until May 20