Bawdy night out at The Snapper
There’s few surprises but Roddy Doyle’s sweary yarn has big laughs
Simon Delaney’s fine protrayal of Jimmy Rabbitte dominates and gets most of the laughs
The Snapper Gate Theatre, until September 15 ★★★★★
What does Jimmy Rabbitte work at? I ask because it would have added a little extra dimension to the conversations in a play where everyone talks for two hours about almost nothing but the extra-marital pregnancy of Jimmy’s daughter Sharon after a back-seat drunken romp with a married neighbour. Even Sharon’s friends never get round to another topic. Admittedly there’s a nod to young Darren’s interest in football and cycling, and in the enthusiasm of the young twin girls for ballroom dancing.
But perhaps I’m being too pernickety. Taken for what it is, the show is not so much a play as an episodic but very entertaining elongated linguistic f***-fest of a comedy sketch, excellent of its type, but needing very skilful direction to make up for the lack of a plot or any element of surprise.
And it gets that direction from the inventiveness of director Róisín McBrinn, and the cracking pace she sets that covers the question marks that keep cropping up.
Jimmy Rabbitte is supposed to be the essence of an authentic Dubliner, a tough nut with a fourletter cynical wit, whose crude exterior hides a heart of gold. In fact, he’s a sentimentalised moron, who despite having four children, including twins, seems to know nothing about female anatomy and sensitivity except what he gets belatedly from a book.
In Simon Delaney’s fine portrayal he dominates the stage and gets most of the laughs, with occasional very good one-liners, but the most authentic character on-stage is his long-suffering wife Veronica.
Hilda Fay plays her with great restraint, humour, and barely concealed anxiety. Veronica doesn’t like crude language, but she makes an exception for the tedious business of having to sew sequins on little ball gowns. Where Jimmy is a travesty of working-class mentality, Veronica is the real thing. But then I don’t know what class he might claim to be since he never seems to work or even talk about it.
Sharon’s encounter with the wife of the unrevealed father is totally unconvincing, but so is the failure of everyone to put two and two together about his identity. Even the excellent Kate Gilmore as Sharon’s pal doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion. Hazel Clifford as the morally upright Sharon who has slipped up once, gets as much as she can from a role that gives little scope apart from going through the tribulations of unplanned pregnancy.