Since he emerged as a formidable playwright in 1988, Billy Roche has been the laureate of the unremarkable. The stuff of his best work has been the epic yearning encased within ordinary lives. His Wexford has been at once a precise and immediate location and a field on which, through sport and music, sex and violence, his people have grown their own legends.
Already in the late 1980s, Roche's imagined Wexford with its tightly woven tapestry of communal memories and extraordinary intimacy was becoming slightly anachronistic. But the energy with which he bridged the gap between past and present gave these plays their cutting edge.
Eight years after his last new play at the Peacock, Cavalcaders, the gap is bigger and the necessary leap is larger. The basic problem with Roche's new play On Such As We, is that it falls into that gap rather than leaping over it. Much of what is so remarkable in his work - the vivid appropriation of Wexford dialect, the deep affection for unheroic people, the deadpan wit, the patient attention to the quiet notes of sorrow beneath the babble of everyday conversation - is all here.
While all of these things provide many momentary pleasures, though, they are not enough of themselves to make a powerful play. What's needed is a way to fuse the imaginary world of the drama, which is drawn almost entirely from the pop culture of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, with the 21st century story we are supposed to be witnessing.
The presence of pre-1970s popular culture in the play goes very deep. It's not just in the songs the characters sing - Scarlet Ribbons, Living Doll, The More I See You - and the movies they refer to. It is in the very structure of the play itself.
On Such As We is basically a cowboy picture. Wexford is being plagued by an evil bandit, the unseen, thuggish developer P.J. The hero, Oweney, is John Wayne in a barber shop, the strong if not quite silent rock of a man who can only be pushed so far and who is, for the sake of romantic interest, hopelessly in love with P.J.'s wife. The denouement is, inevitably, a physical showdown on Main Street between the goodie and the baddie.
There is no innate reason why this mythic movie structure could not work. The difficulty is that the world Roche wants to pack into it is the here-and-now of fast-moving Celtic Tiger Ireland. It's a society in which young Sally, one of the waifs and strays who gather around Oweney's shop, has been put on the Pill by the head nun. It's a world of haute couture and casual sex, a world where middle-aged barbers have bruschetta and red wine in their living quarters.
There's a fundamental disconnection and the episodic structure of the play, with short scenes played out in three separate areas of the stage, doesn't help. It is hard to imagine a way in which director Wilson Milam and the excellent cast could escape these basic problems. The best they can do is to inject as much pace and precision as possible.
Milam's staging is, in this regard, extremely impressive, making light of the physical complexities of the action. Brendan Gleeson's calm, understated charisma in the central role of Oweney is a huge asset. Gleeson pulls off the very difficult trick of making a genuinely nice man much more compelling than most bad guys. Laurence Kinlan does something similar with a figure who might have been too nice to be interesting, a gormless kid for whom Oweney becomes a surrogate father. These performances are so good, that, for a while, you can forget that the play itself is rather orphaned, abandoned somewhere between myth and reality.
Runs until January 26th. To book phone 01-8787222
