Billy Roche's Amphibians, commissioned and first staged by the Royal Shakespeare in The Pit at the Barbican in the early 90s, comes across, in the author's own production (its first in Ireland), much more richly and rhythmically than it did in London. It is, incidentally, a shame that no established Irish theatre or production company saw fit to present it before this.
It is its author's most complex and difficult stage play and deserves better stage facilities than are available in the theatrically little-used YMCA Hall in Wexford.
Couched in local myth and mystery, it is about passing on the traditions of the past to the generations of the future against the callous and threatening opposition of the materialistic present.
Eagle (Stanley Townsend in sturdy form) is a lone fisherman who is determined to hand on to his young son Isaac (a very young actor with palpable stage presence) the tradition of the passage of rites that used to attend St Martin's Eve when the son would spend the night alone on Useless Island off the shore of Wexford.
But before Isaac is taken to the island, where his father has built a tented hut for him, we have seen another, more sinister and less thoughtful, rite enacted when the disinherited Broaders (a compellingly threatening Gary Lydon) initiates his dangerously idiotic buddy Humpy (superbly sycophantic David Ganly) into his disruptive gang of the crab, of which the unhappy Zak (Claude Clancy) is also a member.
Eagle's sister Sonia (Aileen Donohue) is doing a line with the new boss (Steven Murphy) of the local fish factory where the crab gang work reluctantly, and his wife Veronica (Brid Malone) is uneasy about his putting young Isaac through the traditional ritual.
Dribbler (Billy Roche), a fan of wild west cowboy novels and amiably neutral in the local conflicts, also works in the fish factory, and there are a buried drowned grandmother and a buried illegitimate baby in the local graveyard to add to the social and cultural tensions. The complicated tale of tensions and confrontations is superbly spun and nicely concluded by the author, even if, in his direction, he loses some of the physical danger of the crucial penultimate scene when Isaac's island isolation is invaded.
David Redmond has done his level best to make feasible, in a limited stage space, the complex settings required, and Mark Redmond has tried to work miracles of illumination and atmosphere with a very limited lighting rig. The actors, all of them, do very well in ensemble and act as if born to the parts they play, and the play is worth travelling many miles to see. It plays in Wexford until June 14th and there are, as yet, no plans for it to tour as it, and its potential audiences, deserve.
Runs until June 14th To book phone 053-34180
