Harvesting the past over dinner
There are dark undercurrents around the dinner table as one family struggles to keep the past where it belongs
The Harvest NewTheatre u ntil June 23
I’ve got used over the years to first-night audiences laughing in the wrong places or for the wrong reasons. They’ve paid their money, so I suppose they’re entitled to have their fun. It’s understandable in serious plays when the dialogue is deliberately ambiguous. Sometimes it’s the fault of the performers or the director, but things usually settle down when the merry-makers cop on. Judging by the level of cackles and guffaws on the opening night of Jane McCarthy’s new play, however, a lot of the audience seemed determined to find this emotionally intricate play a regular hoot from beginning to end. The trouble this time was that the laughter sometimes upset the build-up of tension.
In fact, there’s very little in it that’s meant to be funny. It’s a play that has an undercurrent of menace throughout, as the four characters try to make their way through lives that have been distorted by past events, while they’re trying to cope with the results or avoiding bringing things into the open.
Jane McCarthy is good at setting up a good dramatic situation as she showed in her previous play Overtime. There’s Charlotte (Melissa Nolan), going to therapy sessions as she recovers from the death of a child and a serious car accident while enduring an overbearing husband; Shane is a former convict attending the same sessions; and Charlotte’s son (Fionn Foley), obviously has psychological problems. But the play really centres around Charlotte’s husband Malcolm (Marcus Lamb), project manager and humourless control freak, who at some stage had an unacknowledged association with the ex-con drug addict Shane.
The four-sided relationship is nicely balanced and uncomfortable, creating doubt about who’s up to what, and what exactly is going on, but the action could do with more low-key direction in some of the confrontations, to provide a more sinister atmosphere of antagonism early on, especially in the dinner scene.
As the truth unfolds the dramatic content gradually increases; indeed, by the time all is sorted out it gets close to melodrama. But it’s an engaging, neatly constructed if slightly over-extended work, although I kept wondering why such a hung-up family never seemed to lock the back door. John Morton as Shane has perhaps the most expansive role, but there’s generally good ensemble work from the four performers.
‘I kept wondering why such a hung-up family never seemed to lock the back door’