BWW Reviews: Transgender Lives Brought to Fore in LUCK JUST KISSED YOU HELLO

A dying man's heartbeat ticks like a bomb in Amy Conroy's new play, a co-production between HotForTheatre and the Galway International Arts Festival. For three fraught individuals overlooking the deathbed of Big Ted Donovan, resolving their feelings about the man isn't easy. Distance can be measured by his son Gary's (Will O'Connell) need to Google 'How to write a eulogy?". Such efforts only posit different versions of the same person.

Staged intimately in the Mick Lally Theatre, it's a damn smart model: having macho-acting childhood friend Sullivan (Mark Fitzgerald), gay man Gary and his transgender twin Laura, recently transitioned to Mark (Conroy) all sitting on different points along a spectrum of masculinity.

Complexly, in trying to eulogise and construct the whole of one man, the characters threaten to deconstruct the masculinities of each other, principally Mark, who has the most to lose. Conroy is sensitive in the role, her razor-tipped hair an effective inscription of gender markers, playing both defense and offence with her usual quick liners ("Our father ..." begins Gary's prayer. "Thou art in a coma?" she finishes). For Mark, to sign Ted's will as 'Laura', the name recognised in the document, is to declare surrender.

While the siblings recall their father as a tyrant, Sullivan, a somewhat surrogate son, protests: "You're only remembering him in pieces". Toting the line between masculinity and violent outburst, Fitzgerald has brawn and believability that transcends playing to type, a challenge that is greater for intelligible O'Connell whose character, when issued a stereotypical lifestyle of glam surfaces and exhibition openings, gets to respond: "It's even more fabulous than that".

The deliveries are excellently timed under Caitriona McLaughlin's direction. With Conroy's gentle touch, Mark can only attempt to explain his transition ("It's hard to explain. My skin didn't fit") but more may be revealed in a childhood memory, as the azure panels of Aedín Cosgrove's hospital room set send us to a pier along the ocean. Here, more expressionistic devices are used - purple flares from John Crudden's lighting, choral dialogue - as if to critically remove us from the illusion. Rather, the abstraction does more to confuse the experience.

This points to a serious structural problem, and as the drama goes on it spirals fast out of control. Towards the end, speeches are more ordered by the cleaning up of the script rather than being prompted by the logic or developments of the scene. When Mark is finally referred to by name, instead of "Laura", it should be a breathtaking beat but it comes at an inopportune time. As we arrive at a brilliant final monologue, you only wish it came at the end of a more solid-structured drama.

While this chaos will have you lament the simple architecture of Conroy's earlier dramas (the one-two delivery of I ♥ Alice ♥ I comes to mind), it's still incredibly seminal in giving primacy to transgender lives in Irish theatre. Most memorable is what Mark finds in the water under that pier: the flooding in of new possibilities. Luck kissing hello.

Luck Just Kissed You Hello runs at the Mick Lally Theatre as part of the Galway International Arts Festival until 25 July. For more information and tickets, see giaf.ie. Photo: Pat Redmond.

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