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There’s a great joke and a whole lot of human truth at the heart of JM Synge’s tragicomic classic, set on the west coast of Ireland in the early 1900s. A stranger stumbles into a rural pub, claiming to have murdered his father. Soon the otherwise mediocre young man has acquired celebrity status and Heathcliff-esque sex appeal among the locals – a strict Christian community in whose lyrical peasant language pagan passions swirl. What could prove more humiliating and emasculating in this context than for his dad to rock up, not quite dead after all, with a bandaged head and a tale of his own?
Director Polina Kalinina’s sparse rustic staging opens with the cast smearing mud on the back wall to the strains of Thin Lizzy. Inflated by the women’s admiration, Ciaran O’Brien’s protagonist comes to see himself as part biblical wanderer, part rock ’n’ roll rebel, playing air guitar with a spade when no one is looking. He is as intoxicated by their attentions as they are by his story.
There are good performances, including Natalie Radmall-Quirke as a wild and wryly predatory Widow Quinn and Sophie Dickson as the publican’s spirited daughter Pegeen Mike, who learns the ‘gap between a gallus story and a dirty deed’.
But the studio set-up strips the entrances of dramatic impact, and there’s not enough antic energy. Pegeen’s closing cry, full of the pain of detox from the promise of ‘savagery and fine words’, tears through a rather drowsy reverie.