Youth’s the Season–?
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
At the beginning of Youth’s the Season–?, a 1930 play by the neglected Irish writer Mary Manning, the privileged, nearly 21-year-old Desmond (David Rawle) admits that his worst fear is to end up buying a bowler hat and an umbrella. Not exactly high stakes, then. And yet this aversion to conformity is the driving force of a funny, dark and highly entertaining play that skewers the pretensions and self-delusions of the Free State’s bright young things.
Desmond is an “effeminate” young man desperate to escape the confines of home to pursue a creative job in London, provided his father can foot the bill. Sick of himself and “unutterably sick of Dublin”, he conspires with his best friend, Toots (Ciara Berkeley), to distract from the reality of their lives by throwing a party.
This is bad news for his chronically indecisive sister, Connie (Molly Hanly), who can’t choose between a situationship with Terence (Kerill Kelly), a literary softboy, or potential marriage to the boring, dependable Harry (Youssef Quinn). Both suitors will be in attendance.
Desmond’s second sister, Deirdre (Sadhbh Malin), has love down to a science, but her doctor husband, Gerald (Jack Meade), is determined to use the soirée to bring out her irrational side.
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The partygoers are joined by their louche friend Willie (Eoin Fullston) and, more troublingly, by the mute Egosmith (Lórcan Strain) – effectively a modernist device that serves as a reflective surface for the group.
The bon vivants spend more than two hours exchanging witty, endlessly quotable barbs (“Aren’t you writing a novel? Who isn’t in Dublin?”). But the play transforms what could be a shallow comedy of manners into a complex exploration of identity as performance. The characters in Youth’s the Season–? are deeply uncertain about their national, gender and sexual identities in a rapidly changing Ireland, and go to great lengths to mask their insecurities until the last. Beware your own reflections, Terence says.
Youth may be wasted on the play’s characters, but it is put to good use by Sarah Jane Scaife, the production’s director, who gets the most out of an excellent ensemble cast of young actors, many of whom are making their Abbey Theatre debuts. What could have been a static, overly talky play zips along, and formal shifts from realism to expressionist nightmare are deftly handled through vivid movement pieces, evocative lighting and understated sound design.
The play is often hilarious, notably when the flirtatious mother (Valerie O’Connor) or innocent convent girl (Mazzy Ronaldson) are on stage. These scenes are balanced by genuinely sad and moving moments, such as when Toots’s comforting self-delusions are finally dashed.
With so many themes and theatrical modes, there is a danger that the whole thing won’t quite come together. For the most part it does, even if the production has a tendency to overindulge in the self-centred neuroses of its characters.
The set of Youth’s the Season–? is dominated by two huge mirrors, reflecting the characters to themselves. In this timely revival of an outrageously overlooked play, they often do the same for the audience.
Youth’s the Season–? is at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, May 3rd
