Any Other Business: Part LXXII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Photo: Eric Ray Davidson

David Boreanaz Said What?!

You could have knocked me down with a feather the other month when watching SEAL Team on the channel formerly known as Sky One, David Boreanaz’s Bravo One Jason Hayes on being informed the HVT was leaving the train with the triggermen still on it, shouted “F*CK!”. What?! WHAT?! On Network TELEVISION?! I thought I must have misheard it. Did he perhaps say cluck, duck, luck? None of which would make much sense… Then he said it again. What was going on? Then a quick google later I saw that SEAL Team had moved from CBS to its streaming service. Ah… And, based on what had been happening in that rip-roaring train episode, it must have done this between commercial breaks. I’m not sure that SEAL Team actually gains that much from the profanity that has been added to the show. But my word it remains weird as hell to see Boreanaz after a network television career of eight years as Angel, twelve as Seeley Booth, and four and a bit as Jason Hayes, suddenly start effing and blinding like a sailor.

The Lonesome West

Decadent Theatre Company returned to the Gaiety Theatre with another Martin McDonagh play, but strangely this was far less outre than their previous outings.

Coleman (Denis Conway) and Valeen (Franke McCafferty) are brothers in the lonesome wesht of the semi-cursed townland of Leenane engaged in what Hunter S Thompson might have called a profoundly active balance of terror. Bickering over Tayto crisps, religious statues, and the ownership and exclusive usage of a new stove are the tip of an iceberg of more grievous crimes from the recent past but going back decades. Little wonder that Father Welsh (Art Campion) has a crisis of faith about twice a week with the unholy goings on of his parishioners…

Looking back at this 1997 script it’s noticeable that the extended quiet scene of Girleen (Zara Devlin) talking to Father Welsh (Art Campion) before something truly awful happens seems to have stuck with McDonagh as something worth revisiting at length as the second act of The Pillowman.

3.5

Portia Coughlan

The Abbey’s revisiting of Marina Carr’s 1990s coruscating work continued apace with a revival of Portia Coughlan starring Denise Gough.

Portia Coughlan is turning 30. But she has no intention of marking the day with any positivity, instead drinking alone as soon as the kids have gone to school, as her husband Raphael (Marty Rea) discovers to his horror. Despite the best attempts of her friends and family to cheer her up, and her own fumbled affairs with local likely lads, the day is hollowed out by the absence of her twin brother Gabriel who drowned himself years before. And the horror of that long past day will be lived all over again, and then explained, thanks to Carr’s curious structure.

The opening line of the play signals that extreme abrasiveness is about to follow. And the influence of Pulp Fiction is plain to see in the death of Portia, in what seems an incredibly bold stroke, only for the clock to rewind as we follow her up to that point, as Carr once again invests the Midlands with the depravity and ritual horror of Ancient Greek myths. Once again the lack of an interval seems less a means of sustaining tension and more an affectation as an obvious curtain is played through. Caroline Byrne, however, directs with a keen eye for pace and balance between black comedy and harrowing drama.

4/5