Home, Boys, Home
Civic Theatre, Tallaght
★★★★☆
“I don’t feel like I belong anywhere,” says Shane, an ageing Irish expat returning to a changed country. The man who left Ireland in the 1980s, inspired by the electricity of a Ramones gig and pushed away by the dismal repetitiveness of nixers, feels like a stranger now.
Home, Boys, Home is the final act in a trilogy that began in 1990 with In High Germany, a story of three childhood friends who, after emigrating in 1988, found soccer to be their anchor to home. The playwright and novelist Dermot Bolger returns to his story of belonging once more. Fourteen years after The Parting Glass, which followed his protagonists on the night Thierry Henry’s handball caused Ireland’s exit from the 2010 World Cup qualifiers, we follow Shane as he returns from the Netherlands a broken soul: a widower – with a failed marriage before that – and no family to bind him in his twilight years.
We find him some months after his return to Dublin, frequenting old drinking spots around Cabra and Drumcondra, before retreating to rental accommodation in Ongar, where “housing estates swallow up people like black holes from space”. Ray Yeates reprises his role in this production, almost 30 years on from his first with Bolger. He is strongly accompanied by Fionnuala Gygax and Donna Anita Nikolaisen, who play various roles, believably occupying the space of a cocky drug dealer one moment, an immigrant the next.
Shane oscillates between stream-of-consciousness narration and dialogue with his peers. He is, in many ways, broken. “I’m struggling in this new multicultural Ireland,” he says. “I need to learn to swim in it and its dispensation.” His world is upended when he meets a daughter he never knew he had, and a grandson distracted from his burgeoning football career by a drug debt hanging over his head. With a compass finally pointing somewhere, Shane seeks to conquer his emotional unavailability and save not only his new family but also himself, in a shot at redemption to balance out his absenteeism.
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Home, Boys, Home is a powerful commentary on family, societal change and moral regression. It’s both nostalgic and contemporary, mourning a country and its expats, and tackling the socially catastrophic gangland crime that plagues its inheritors. It’s both an ode to soccer and a warning to those who slip through the cracks. Bolger’s understanding of the human experiences shines through as his characters seek to live their unlived lives vicariously through those they love.
It captures the directionless feeling of a returning emigrant: friends have moved on; the landscape is carved up by new buildings with new people – a country defined by a rapid modernisation at the expense of its returning children.
The real star is Bolger’s thought-provoking, heartbreaking and often witty script. “I gave up smoking the night Ireland lost to Macedonia to get kicked out of Euro 2000,” Shane says. “I was so broken up by it I thought I wouldn’t notice the withdrawal symptoms.”
Where Home, Boys, Home misses the mark is not in its missteps but in the steps it almost takes. Yeates’ performance is precise in its execution of Bolger’s script, but it can seem as if the play’s moments of emotional depth take place in what otherwise feels like an exercise in straddling greatness.
Continues at the Civic, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, October 12th
