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This review is from the 2016 opening of 'If We Got Some More Cocaine...' at Old Red Lion Theatre. It will return at Vault Festival 2018.
Mikey and Casey are stuck. Both in the immediate sense – this play takes place entirely on a rooftop, where they’re hiding from the police after robbing a petrol station – and more generally, in life and by life in the small town of Ennis, Ireland. Chatting under the influence of (at times credulity-stretching) snouts of cocaine, these lads seem rough and tough: they’ve pinched Casey’s violent drug-dealing step-dad’s stash; Mikey really can’t get caught because he’s already up for assault.
They’re also in love, and John O’Donovan’s first full-length play offers a rare and refreshing look at a gay relationship that is working class and utterly uncamp. Yet in two finely-tuned performances, from Ammar Duffus as the closeted black English teenager who feels like a perennial outsider and Alan Mahon as the openly gay Mikey, their sparring is shot through with sweetness, their dicking about undercut with desperation. It’s a shame that the physical chemistry isn’t quite there – one embrace felt oddly arms-length.
But Mahon, with fizzing comic timing, is especially good at conveying the charisma of Mikey: on paper a selfish arsehole, but in flesh made as ‘very loveable’ as he declares himself. Still, we see this confidence is also just a defence; Mikey is a man who’s learnt never to let his guard down.
The dialogue pops and crackles with rude affection (looking at Casey’s stuck-together porno mags is ‘like trying to browse the layers of a vol-au-vent’). At only 75 minutes, O’Donovan proves adept at including a hefty amount of backstory, and a subtle sprinkle of social context, nodding to Ireland’s gay marriage referendum. ‘If We Got Some More Cocaine…’ is a reminder that prejudices regarding sexual orientation, but also race and class, will never shift overnight.
BY: HOLLY WILLIAMS