BWW Reviews: Rough Magic's New Play FAMISHED

There's an Irish proverb: 'Is fear bothán biamhar ná caisleán gortach', or 'A cabin filled with food is better than a famished castle'. The stylistic tumble of lovers against stony pillars and glittery curtains on Bláithín Sheerin's set for Hilary Fannin's new play produced by Rough Magic foreshadows turns of seduction by money, wine, and lust. The chance encounter of Angie (Aislín McGuckin) and Nat (Ray Scannell) at the airport casts us back to their intense romance in an era locked in the jaws of the Celtic Tiger. Could things have turned out differently?

Since their break-up, school teacher Angie has gotten married and had kids, while Nat has moved to Berlin for work and started dating a girl ten years his younger. The script would have us believe there to be fiery passion. However, the actors don't sell their chemistry too well: McGuckin's unsubtle and proclamatory speech conflicts with Scannell's more naturalistic and downplayed delivery. The clumsily-made match could have done with more guidance by director Lynne Parker.

Fannin, known for her weekly column in the Life section of the Irish Times, writes her ideal heroine in Angie: a partridge soup-making, style conscious, married woman with children who is still maturing on the road towards middle-age. However, you'd sense a grander narrative is the greater goal here, as the playwright checks off hot-topics from over the last few years: cutbacks in schools and hospitals, discovery of unmarked children's graves, emigration. Nat's misogynistic father Tom (Vincent McCabe), a money-obsessed property developer, embodies the destructive attitudes of the boom, and is met with curious resistance by his wine-boozing wife Trixie (Eleanor Methven), positing a matriarchal force caught up in wealth and re-discovered sexuality. "Who are you, the Oracle?" she asks sarcastically in Methvan's sharp wit, a line that seems to cross Celtic Tiger Ireland with Greek tragedy.

For a drama that's damn Dionysian, there's very little heat. While McCabe and Methven at least have the timing to serve the script's humour, McGuckin and Scannell have no charge. Furthermore, that Parker doesn't find a more imaginative means to mask scene changes than the actors' straight repositioning of scenery leaves the staging lagging. Her preference for indirectness towards the end with Angie drifting stylistically from an overwhelming family dinner, feels like either a botched departure into the symbolist theatre or a Brechtian alienation technique crashing to the ground.

If distant lovers are to service a polemic of Celtic Tiger greed, Parker's staging isn't sharp enough to impart the play's grotesques. This leaves Fannin's castle sieged by the hollow and superficial forces that she wanted to make her subjects in the first place.

Famished Castle ran at the Pavilion Theatre, Dublin from May 13-23. For more information see roughmagic.ie. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

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