The Empty Nest
Cork Arts Theatre
★★★★☆
The first impression left by this lively performance of Oisín Flores Sweeney’s play is that, at 55 minutes, it should run for at least another half an hour. Brevity is said to be the soul of wit, but that adage need not be taken quite so firmly as it is here, although it is a good indication of a production that its audience leaves laughing and longing for more.
Presented by Blood in the Alley and directed by Geoff Gould, the piece concerns a married couple on the precipice of middle age and separately reluctant to engage in their new child-free domestic and social status.
Tony, played by Seamus O’Rourke, is fatalistic and determined to see all present and future possibilities as futile. Sheila, played by Joan Sheehy – and equipped with a tongue that could clip a hedge – challenges his despondency with a willingness to grasp at opportunity, seeing the way change allows options and sensing also the threatening sterility of their years together.
Armchair to armchair on this one captured evening – which is like every other evening – they try to find satisfying entertainment in their ageing television. Their reactions flick off one another just as they flick through programmes, as if control of the remote offers a kind of control of life. This Gogglebox arrangement is used with purpose to reveal their attitudes: Sheila is very interested in Naked Attraction; Tony ponders the reality of the ads for female hygiene. As they quip and kick off one another, their long married life – failing as if quenched by disappointment – is also revealed.
Yet from beginning to end it is all inescapably funny. The comedy is cleverly achieved in being, more than anything else, believable. That doesn’t mean predictable: at times the laughter comes from surprise, from the unlikely, from what is very likely but somehow different. Sweeney has a sharp ear and little care for sweetness and light, although there are hints of both. These are two embattled people who rip off one another with the rapidity of customary challenge. There is also a customary if disguised affection, a recognition that they didn’t ever imagine themselves having this kind of conversation, yet they reach it so that a credible resolution can be promised.
For all its ebullient and unholy energy it is not dialogue alone that carries such a layered weight of contrasts. Where Sheehy and O’Rourke’s performances have an edge of bitter resentment they also have a surviving empathy, their shifting glance and changing expressions as crucial to their veracity as the pace and pauses of their exchanges. However excoriating the words may be, there is so much more than words to be savoured.
Lighting and sound are by Arran MacGabhann and Tadhg O’Sullivan, but Gould’s set justifies the second impression left by this memorable presentation – which is that larger armchairs are required.
The Empty Nest is at Cork Arts Theatre until Saturday, August 24th
