September 12, 2004
The Druid Theatre Company’s performance of the entire JM Synge canon continues at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway with a double bill of two short plays; The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints. The Tinker’s Wedding is a very short, one act farce, telling the efforts of a sharp-tongued tinker to persuade the local priest to officiate at her wedding. The Well of the Saints is a longer piece, and recounts the story of two blind tramps who have their sight restored by a holy man.
The drawback of performing an entire canon of any playwright is that you get to see the weaker works as well as the strong. You’d be hard pushed to find a greater collection of caricatures than in The Tinker’s Wedding. The tinkers are portrayed as drunken, quarrelling, thieving, superstitious primitives – the bride to be a fierce-tempered shrew, her somewhat reluctant future husband is a complete sliveen, and his mother is a bawdy old drunk. The priest is as bad – a lazy, greedy and uncharitable snob. I don’t know how the play was received on its debut, but I’d say it would get a cool reception at Pavee Point.
The Well of the Saints is a morality tale – the two wandering tramps, Martin and Mary Doul, have spent years wondering what the world looks like – perceptions that are promptly shattered when a holy man restores their site using water from a holy well. It’s hard to warm to a play that treats its characters with such disdain. Having spent the opening scene of the play declaring their love for each other (and surmising what fine looking people they both are), the two react in horror and contempt once they can see each other and discover that they are both in fact grizzled old-timers. Martin in particular heaps vituperative upon his wife, abandons her and makes a fool of himself chasing a much young woman.
The Well is a rather nasty little play. Neither the two main characters, nor the supporting characters have any redeeming features at all. And unlike, say a Wilde play, where it’s quite fun to laugh at the misfortune of people who deserve it, the characters in this play are to be pitied rather than pilloried. And it is the central performances of Mick Lally and Marie Mullen that really makes the show so worthwhile – they perfectly capture the desolation, poignancy and sheer desperation of two old people desperately clinging onto their self-made illusions in order to survive. They really are wonderful – in fact, they invest their characters with more humanity than the play really deserves. The play doesn’t have much of a conclusion – it sort of just trails away, and I get the impression that director Garry Hynes wasn’t entirely sure how to pitch it. The final third of the play doesn’t really work at all, and doesn’t so much conclude as just trail off. The play is just too lightweight to really explore or exploit the bitter downside of having one’s wishes come through, and anyway, if you really wanted to see an Irish play examining the bleak reality of life as seen by down-at-luck tramps, you’d probably opt for Beckett.
Aside from the leads, most of the cast are familiar from the earlier Playboy of the Western World production, and it’s good to see some faces from the Galway Youth theatre’s production of Our Country’s Good. Gary Lydon features in both plays (playing two more sliveens), but was very hard to hear in The Tinkers Wedding. Simone Kirby gets promoted to a major role (as Molly) in The Well… and impresses as the capricious and ambitious young woman that so cruelly rejects Martin. Alas, the suggestion that her character too has resigned herself to a compromised life by her marriage to an unappreciative husband is not explored. Another missed opportunity is the role of the Holy Man. His presence is unintentionally funny (the actor Domhnall Gleeson, sporting a mad-looking orange wig and an improbably posh accent, ”I’m going to cure your soight, roight?”) but should represent something darker – having bestowed the gift of sight once when the tramps begged him for it, he threatens to impose it on them when they beg him not to. The production doesn’t really explore that angle, though, to be fair, one gets the impression that Synge didn’t either. The plays are on until the end of the week, is in Ennis at the end of the month, and heads to Dublin next month.
Posted by Monasette at September 12, 2004 11:21 PM