Irish Timeswriters review Sunbeam Girlsat the Cork Opera House and The Country Boyat the Market Place Theatre, Armagh.
Sunbeam Girls, Cork Opera House
Any good director would kill for the cast Marion Wyatt and Stage Centre have assembled for The Sunbeam Girls. These women (the only man is there to shift the furniture) can change in an instant from characters to chorus line, and as characters they can change as well, many taking on two or three roles.
This honest and hard-working engagement has an ebullience strongly supported by a soundtrack spanning the era between Buddy Holly and Simon and Garfunkel; an audience already enchanted by what seems a mirror of a large slice of Cork's vanished industrial life sings and claps along with this, caught in a web of reminiscence, local geography (Popham's Road nearly brought the house down) and female vitality. But the mirror is the kind used for Coronation Street and with no member of the Aisling Cara compound writing team unkind enough to say, literally, 'Enough!', the sequence of vignettes that take the action away from the factory floor and back again never adhere to one another. Personalities are sketched as types to show solidarity or victimhood or resilience, but the research needed to build a plot from these circumstances - with England as the dramatic safety-net, for example - seems to have been skipped.
Nor does anyone really attempt to explain the products or history of this textile factory. The assumption is that everyone knows and on the evidence of opening night this is absolutely true.
But among those who didn't abandon their critical faculties at the Opera House door, a more rigorous control might have been expected of a production which opens on a scene such as the bombing of Dresden, with a siren blaring over Olan Wynne's impressively ruined set. It's only the factory klaxon, but it is also an indication of the fractured nature of the production. Cormac O'Connor's sound design never quite fuses background effects with stage sequences: a dying woman hears a song on the radio and dreams of herself dancing to a different tune altogether, while among several irritating instances a Moses basket is obviously on stage but the baby's wails come from another planet. Other technical contradictions occur too frequently to be forgiven on this multi-purpose set.
Equally, it should have been remembered that repartee is no substitute for dialogue, that mannerisms such as fingers splayed like ballerinas and walks that John Cleese might envy are funny only once, that timing is a crucial factor in comedy and, above all, that the introduction of melodrama involves a complete change of tone, atmosphere and narrative concentration. The intention supporting all this is serious and important, which is why something more than a kind of giddy charm is expected, especially when that charm has to last three hours. - Mary Leland
Until Feb 17
The Country Boy, Market Place Theatre, Armagh
Sometimes it's the simple pleasures that can be the sweetest. John Murphy's The Country Boy is a gentle, old-fashioned hymn to the Irish emigrant, a theme which, five years later, would receive a more sophisticated and cutting-edge treatment in Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!
In Zoe Seaton's persuasive production for Big Telly's 20th anniversary year, there is a double sense of homecoming, both in the play's central storyline and in its return to the North, where it was premiered by the Ulster Group Theatre in April 1959. The country boy of the title is Eddie Maher (James Doran), the favoured son of tight-fisted farmer Tom Maher (John Hewitt). Fifteen years ago, like many young men of his generation, he took off to seek his fortune in the maelstrom of New York. On the surface, Eddie is a big-shot Yank, with a loud, brassy American wife, Julia (Maria Tecce) and everything money can buy.
Eddie has returned to the old country, bursting with nostalgic memories for a rural Ireland, which is long gone. Significantly, the girl he left behind is a married woman, whose health is destroyed by years of childbearing. Only the whiskey bottle can bring him some semblance of comfort.
Meanwhile, his young brother Curly (Ruairi Tohill) is planning to escape across the Atlantic, forsaking the security of farm, family and the comely Eileen Tierney (Gráinne Gilmartin). Much of the enjoyment comes through the truthful ensemble performances, with Doran perfectly nailing the failed expat, Tecce revealing real vulnerability beneath Julia's brittle exterior, Gilmartin and Tohill sweet and sincere as the young lovers and Hewitt and Helena Bereen well matched as the curmudgeonly Maher Senior and his wife, the serene Mary-Kate. The perfect timing of their final exchange sends the audience out into the night beaming with satisfaction. - Jane Coyle
• Tour continues to Virginia, Coleraine, Roscommon, Baby Grand in Belfast, Cookstown, DúLaoghaire and Tallaght
