I can think of a few reasons why ‘The Tailor and Antsy’, currently making its London debut at the Old Red Lion, might have taken 25 years to premiere at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1967. And obscenity shouldn’t have been one of them. Written by Englishman Eric Cross in 1942, it chronicles the story of Timothy ‘Tailor’ Buckley and his wife, Antsy, a real-life elderly couple from Gougane Barra in County Cork whose yarns made them local legends. And didn’t they tell a lot of them. Precocious animals – talking cats, herrings with digestive problems, even the little-known story of the animals who sold out Jesus – feature heavily. But a ‘collection of smut’ as the Irish senate thundered? Save a ditty about a man who liked to ‘clicky click clack’ on the ladies’ ‘ticky tack toos’, these days you’ll find dirtier jokes on CBeebies – though whether that says more about modern Britain than 1940s Ireland, I don’t know.
Cross skilfully captured the southern Irish idiom and director Nuala Hayes (who also plays Antsy) lovingly recreates this pre-EU ‘lost world’. The tailor (Ronan Wilmot) shares some interesting personal philosophies and there’s dramatic potential in the subplot where the couple have to deal with the banning of their own book, but that never really gets off the ground. Nostalgic charm aside, this recollection of stories from the auld country is a little too old-fashioned to make modern audiences which they’d been there.
