The Quiet Man
Civic Theatre, Tallaght
★★★☆☆
Somewhere in 1930s Ireland a public house erupts with cheer. High-spirited regulars gather around a bar to belt out a rebel ballad. Their singsong ends in abrupt silence when a lone, strong-jawed stranger walks through an entrance that, in Loco and Reckless’s production, conspicuously resembles saloon doors.
It’s an ingenious touch by John Breen and Mikel Murfi, the directors behind this new adaptation of The Quiet Man. If John Ford, auteur of cowboy movies, famously transposed the Free State materialism of Maurice Walsh’s short story to a John Hinde postcard crammed with cliche, then why not go western?
The man greeted by awkward silence is Paddy Bán Enright, a local returned from Pittsburgh, and last seen 15 years ago fighting in the Irish War of Independence. In the unflappable form of Art Campion, he is thoughtfully laconic, careful with his words. (“Anything I say gets me into trouble,” he admits later.)
In Breen and Murfi’s adaptation, there are several comments about not speaking up. “You know the most important element in making a sale is silence,” says Micilín Óg, an easily ruffled wheeler-dealer played by Dan Gordon, trying to broker a land purchase on Paddy Bán’s behalf.
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A succinct offer proves successful, and allows Campion’s returnee to outbid – and embarrass – Red Will, a wealthy farmer and artless hothead who, in Peter Gowen’s superb performance, fails at every attempt to impress.
It may be risky to touch this material with slapstick. Ford’s film physicalised the Irish as rowdy, brawling and roaming for drink. Instead there’s a sense of Breen and Murfi reclaiming Walsh’s story, helped by the designers Sabine Dargent and Eugenia Genunchi in creating a surreal rural Ireland overrun by sheep fashioned from elegant wooden armchairs. Why not introduce Mary Kate Danagher, Red Will’s formidable sister, as first seen ranting at passersby for disturbing her sheep, while idyllically surrounded by tweeting songbirds?
Breen and Murfi soon insist on something more serious, however, as Margaret McAuliffe’s coy Mary Kate tries to elicit conversation from the taciturn Paddy Bán in a production that seems to treat Campion’s confident silence as romantic sizzle.
What come across instead are the traumas and economic realities of their world. “The fighting, you’ve got to control it,” Paddy Bán says in a cryptic allusion to his violent past.
As their marriage becomes embittered by a disagreement over Red Will’s refusal to pay Mary Kate’s dowry, she insists on the money as her dead mother’s inheritance: “There’s nothing grubby about it!”
The jokes thin out as the play builds its surrounding characters’ complicated psychologies. (A hell-for-leather coda offers a glimpse of a less stoic Quiet Man.) Walsh’s most enduring critique is the macho flashing of cash. That also makes for one of the play’s best visual gags, when Paddy Bán’s purchase of an impressively large bed, a subject of admiring locals’ gossip, becomes represented during one scene by a tiny miniature. “It’s as big as they said it was,” says Mary Kate.
Runs at the Civic, Tallaght, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 12th
