The following is part of David Nowlan's review of The Salvage Shop, which opened at Garter Lane in Waterford last January:
Jim Nolan's long-awaited and most welcome latest work is not the sort of play to draw whoops and cheers and be forgotten. It is a richly-layered drama to be savoured quietly, its content to be stored in the memory and revisited time and again to retrieve its subtle wisdom, and its performance thoroughly deserved the instant and respectful standing ovation which it drew on Monday night in Waterford.
It is, of course, about redemption. But this is not redemption on the grand scale. Rather, it is to be found in the small acceptance of imperfection and a huge act of self-forgiveness . . . We meet Eddie Tansey and his father Syvlie in the salvage shop where they work and live. Sylvie is foul-mouthed, Eddie mild in the face of provocation. Their business is the rehabilitation of seemingly waste material into objects for which the timber or the glass or the bric-a-brac might never have been intended. But their passions appear to lie elsewhere, in the local seaside small-town Garris Brass Band, over which Sylvie ruled for nearly 40 years and which Eddie apparently deserted many years before, when, maybe, his wife Kathleen left him or he left her.
Ben Barnes has directed the piece unobtrusively well, leaving the sometimes overstated purpose of the play clear and keeping its complex construction perfectly emotionally (and humourously) intact . . .
Runs until Saturday
