Grand Opera House, Belfast
It’s a day that starts badly – kids playing up, unemployed other halves misbehaving, delinquent offspring doing dodgy deals, constant demands being made on meagre family budgets. It’s a day which, surely, can only get better. But a brief moment of madness in the humdrum routine of Frances Shields and Loretta Mackey, two underpaid and overstretched care workers, sets them on an uncontrollable downhill collision course, in which black humour is skilfully blended with pathos and acute social observation.
This is familiar territory in the bulging canon of work by Marie Jones, whose hallmark, since her early days with Charabanc Theatre Company, has been the heightened dramatisation of the experiences of working-class Belfast women. Audiences will approach this latest piece, commissioned in 2010 by the highly regarded English company Paines Plough, not in search of new theatrical adventures but, rather, an evening of entertainment, easy laughter and a crafty plotline. But they will also see Jones in a new light, directing her own work with a sure sense of pace and narrative, offset by two finely balanced performances from Katie Tumelty and Tara Lynne O’Neill.
Jones’s plays have been described as “laughing at toothache” and, indeed, Frances and Loretta’s saving grace is their innate sense of the absurd, their scornful disregard for bureaucracy and their hilariously cold-eyed view on the difficult hand life has dealt them. The move briskly through their daily round, their elderly patients exist merely as addresses. But 17 Miller’s Row is different. Davy McGee lives alone and is bedridden; his existence revolves around betting, medication and Frank Sinatra. The women regard Davy as a special client, so special that his sudden death on their watch presents them with a temptation they are powerless to resist.
The whole affair is thoroughly engaging, but their surreal, nail-biting fall from grace could be made more effective if a few repetitive, sentimental scenes were cut and the interval removed to produce a crisp, well-rounded single act.
Runs until February 18th
