Take Noel Pearson, one of Ireland's most bravely innovative producers of commercial theatre, add Stephen Rea, one of our most casually powerful actors, Dearbhla Molloy, a stage actor so good that we lost her to London theatre, Angeline Ball, a film actor with a significant international reputation, Frank Conway, one of our best stage designers in recent decades, and give them one of Sean O'Casey's greatest plays to present, and expectations are bound to be high. Maybe they were too high to be fulfilled, but this seems to this reviewer to be the least focused and least effective production of "Plough" that he has ever seen.
The programme assures us that, as Sean O'Casey had intended, the action takes place during November, 1915, and Easter week, 1916. It is staged in the Clitheroe flat in a Dublin tenement; in a public house outside which a meeting is being held; in the street outside the tenement; and in Bessie Burgess's room in the tenement. But Frank Conway's setting of a vast red floor stretching from the proscenium arch to the roll-up shutter of the scene dock door and from red-painted wall to red-painted wall on either side of the stage, and Consolata Boyle's costumes - even down to Rosie Redmond's mauve plastic miniskirt - and Stephen Rea's direction of the rhythms and intonations of the author's words and the players' actions, all render the programme's assertion untenable. They also leave the play and its characters quite without any recognisable time or place of reference, in some kind of theatrical limbo.
The speaker to the street meeting is left on the quietude of a video screen talking softly and earnestly (never mind the live roars of the crowd rushing in and out of the pub) and the final soldiers' chorus of Keep the Home Fires Burning is performed around a colour TV set on which the scenes are (presumably) of Dublin burning. It is too ludicrous and gauche for words or feelings. The actors don't stand a chance; most of their voices wafted up into the vacuum of the empty flies. Even the director, Stephen Rea, himself a fine actor, can make nothing of Fluther Good, one of the funniest comedic parts in all of dramatic literature. Dearbhla Molloy's Bessie Burgess has to say in Act One "Mind who you're pushing now" when Jack Clitheroe is not pushing her at all, and her drunkenly vicious row with Nora goes almost unnoticed, so that her final saving of Nora's emptied life in the final act has precious little irony or pathos. Poor Angeline Ball (whose voice projection is not great) may need treatment by the end of the run to restore her vocal cords from meaningless shouting as Mrs Gogan.
Ah, but disappointment - the order of the night - is a poor enough reason to go on about it all, even when the disappointment is profound.
Runs until June 2nd. Booking 01-6771717
