Author Pat McCabe admits that his play
is partly inspired by the late Tadeusz Kantor’s theatrical piece
Dead Class, and Maree Kearns’ set
design seems to show some influence... although, to be fair, there are
only so many changes you can ring on the theme of an old-fashioned,
semi-ghostly, semi-derelict classroom. McCabe’s play follows two
teachers in a Dublin church school as Ireland’s social revolution began
in the 1960s and ’70s. Raphael Bell is everything that Eamon De
Valera’s vision of Ireland could hope for: strict, assiduous, devout
and in temperament wrapped tighter than a present from your mum.
Malachy Dudgeon is from a later generation, growing up with new
freedoms and a liking for Van Morrison. But Raphael is unable to meet
the challenge of liberation, and Malachy unable to live within it. Each
has parental issues in his past and partner issues in his present, each
is traumatised by a child’s death and each goes off his rocker.
Padraic McIntyre’s production toured Ireland to great acclaim a couple
of years ago, and now comes to London’s favourite Irish theatre. It’s
excellently done: as Raphael, Sean Campion is as consistently watchable
as ever, Nick Lee mostly manages to keep up with him as Malachy and the
other three performers take a plethora of roles between them. And
McCabe’s writing and themes alike are deeply evocative. But herein lies
the problem: the piece cannot evoke what is not already in a viewer’s
consciousness or subconscious to be evoked. Even one as keen to
(over)play the Irish card as me must acknowledge that the old
certainties and values of Raphael’s world – a Hibernian version of
Kinder, Küche, Kirche – have
nothing like as much purchase on the British communal memory. This
world is not and was not ours. Once that lack of connection is granted,
further reservations mount up. Why does a supernatural
tempter/trickster character periodically climb through a window and
recite rhymes? Raphael’s wife disappears from the stage for an age
after an incompletely explained birth scene: on her reappearance, is
she still alive or a figment? (Alive, but it took me a while to be
sure.) Above all, could the evening not lose half an hour or so?
Certainly not the happiest days of the protagonists’ lives, nor, I’m
afraid, of this spectator’s.
Written for the Financial
Times.