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It’s almost physically painful to see the vandalism wrought at the Old Vic by the new stage configuration. It’s like looking at some doomed Darwinian experiment, a cloven-hoofed butterfly, a spaniel with a trunk, a winged slug. Worse still is the fussy, over-ambitious set for Anna Mackmin’s production of Dancing at Lughnasa. Apparently, no one realised that bolting a sycamore tree, yes an entire tree, to the upright of the proscenium arch and then dumping a big old stove next to it would look a bit weird. Arch, tree, stove, all in a line. Strangest thing I’ve seen all year. The play is a classic Irish wrist-slasher from the Frank McCourt school of rural suicidalism. Take cover, everyone. Blarney attack.
We’re in the 1930s and five sisters, mostly virgins, are trapped in a fetid backwater yearning for fulfilment. Little simpering Rose pines for her lost love. So does little simpering Christina. Whining Agnes is half-dead with housework while whimsical Maggie cheers up Misery Manor with ancient limericks and Christmas cracker jokes. Nasty old Kate, with a face like something made by Black and Decker, has lost her teaching job but kept her wheedling school-room stridency and there’s a demented uncle moping in the wings, Fr Jack, a failed African missionary who suffers from psychosis, malaria and unrequited longings for his house-boy. What else? A pretentious chorus figure mooches in and out and gives away the ending half way through act two which, I need hardly tell you, involves alcoholism, destitution, old age, loneliness, death, death and a bit more death. In case this wasn’t depressing enough, he then delivers a symbolist lecture on the worldless significance of dance.
Some of the acting is as decent as the script will allow. Andrea Corr (lead singer of The Corrs) is fine as a beautiful giggling door-mat and Niamh Cusack brings plenty of oomph to the tomboyish role of Maggie. The accents are strangely nomadic but, with one exception, all are at least recognisably Irish. Finbar Lynch’s Uncle Jack enunciates like James Mason giving an elocution lesson to the partially deaf. Until this booming phoneticist took the stage I had no idea that the word jam had four syllables. Ji-ea-arm-ah. Wonderful for ordering your breakfast at Claridge’s but hardly the speech rhythms of rural Ireland. Like that accent, the play is a bizarre and wanton distortion. Friel has defamed the Irish poor in order to supply the bourgeoisie with those images of quaintly distressed peasants which, for some reason, it constantly craves. The BBC is currently catering to the same appetite with Comic Relief, its long-standing crusade to paralyse Africa’s economy and keep it in thrall to poverty-tourists and aid-colonisers. Rural Ireland was never as depressed and insular as is suggested by Friel and his quintet of cultureless skivvies. There were well-established routes out of the ailing, failing Gaelstrom, chiefly to England and America, and anyone with a shred of foresight and ambition made an early exit. If you’re planning to see this dance of death, I strongly advise you to write your will first.
Friel owes a huge debt to Chekhov, which he can’t repay, nor can the authors of Burnt by the Sun, a play adapted by Peter Flannery from a 1994 Russian film. The Chekhov deficit has been foolishly underlined by a set which features rows of trees lit with sepia filters — top of the the list of Chekhov clichés. We’re in the 1930s — again — and this time it’s the Great Terror. (Cyanide pills away, please, and pay attention.) The play opens with a family mooching around a big country house while the Red Army performs manoeuvres in the wheatfields. Both dialogue and characters feel schematic. There are set-piece debates between the Rough Soldier and the Preening Intellectual. The plot finally starts when long-lost family friend Mitia arrives home from Europe and begins the arduous process of explaining why he abandoned his fiancée and became a spy. Some of the acting in this slow-burn doom-athon is passable. Ciarán Hinds does well playing grumpy old git General Kotov and Michelle Dockery has a beautiful stillness as his dupe of a wife. But the minor actors are fidgety and distracting. They mug and chatter away and react to unfunny gags with gales of fake hilarity. Rather than engaging with the audience this frozen and remote display seemed to have been staged purely for the cast’s amusement. And the take-home message, that the Terror was terrible and Stalin was a Stalinist, won’t come as news to anyone with a brain.
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