My Own Personal Theatre Awards 2017

“Then the greatness of our city brings it about that all the good things from all over the world flow in to us, so that to us it seems just as natural to enjoy foreign goods as our own local products” – Pericles’ Funeral Oration, Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War.

Best Production

Waiting for Godot (Druid/The Abbey)

The Effect (Project Arts Centre)

The Dumb Waiter (The Gate)

The Pillowman (The Gaiety)

I Hear You and Rejoice (The Pavilion)

The Man in the Woman’s Shoes (The Pavilion)

Tribes (The Gate)

 

Best New Play

The Effect by Lucy Prebble (Project Arts Centre)

I Hear You and Rejoice by Mikel Murfi (The Pavilion)

Tribes by Nina Raine (The Gate)

Autumn Royal by Kevin Barry (Project Arts Centre)

Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn (Project Arts Centre)

This isn’t my Desk by Kate Cosgrove (Smock Alley)

 

Best Director

Garry Hynes – Waiting for Godot (Druid/The Abbey)

Ronan Phelan – The Effect/Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play (Project Arts Centre)

Joe Dowling – The Dumb Waiter (The Gate)

Andrew Flynn –  The Pillowman (The Gaiety)

Geoff O’Keefe – King Lear (The Mill Theatre)

Catriona McLaughlin – Autumn Royal (Project Arts Centre)

Best Actor

Mikel Murfi – The Man in the Woman’s Shoes/I Hear You and Rejoice (The Pavilion)

Marty Rea – Waiting for Godot/The Great Gatsby (Druid/The Abbey & The Gate)

Aaron Monaghan – Waiting for Godot (Druid/The Abbey & The Gate)

Garrett Lombard – The Dumb Waiter (The Gate)

Lorcan Cranitch – The Dumb Waiter (The Gate)

Peter Gowen – The Pillowman (The Gaiety)

Philip Judge – King Lear (The Mill Theatre)

Donal Gallery – The Effect (Project Arts Centre)

 

Best Actress

Siobhan Cullen – The Effect/Crestfall (Project Arts Centre/The Abbey)

Rachel O’Byrne – The Great Gatsby (The Gate)

Clare Dunne – Tribes (The Gate)

Charlie Murphy – Arlington (Landmark/The Abbey)

Seana Kerslake – King of the Castle (Druid/The Gaiety)

Karen McCartney – Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play (Project Arts Centre)

Rebecca O’Mara – Private Lives (The Gate)

 

Best Supporting Actor

Mark Huberman – The Great Gatsby (The Gate)

Nick Dunning – Tribes (The Gate)

Rory Nolan – Waiting for Godot (Druid/The Abbey)

Marty Rea – King of the Castle (Druid/The Gaiety)

Garrett Lombard – Waiting for Godot (Druid/The Abbey)

Gary Lydon – The Pillowman (The Gaiety)

Conor O’Riordan – Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play (Project Arts Centre)

Michael David McKernan – King Lear (The Mill Theatre)

Gavin Drea – Tribes (The Gate)

Ronan Leahy – The Effect (Project Arts Centre)

 

Best Supporting Actress

Aoibheann McCann – The Great Gatsby (The Gate)

Fiona Bell – Tribes (The Gate)

Ali White – The Effect (Project Arts Centre)

Sharon McCoy – King Lear (The Mill Theatre)

Maureen Rabbitt – This isn’t my Desk (Smock Alley)

Liz Fitzgibbon  – A Statue for Bill Clinton (Belvedere College)

Nessa Matthews – Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play (Project Arts Centre)

Best Set Design

Francis O’Connor – Waiting for Godot/Private Lives/King of the Castle/The Dumb Waiter/ (Druid/The Abbey & The Gate & Druid/The Gaiety & The Gate)

Owen MacCarthaigh – The Pillowman (Gaiety Theatre)

Ciaran Bagnall – The Great Gatsby (The Gate)

Molly O’Cathain – Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play (Project Arts Centre)

Conor Murphy – Tribes (The Gate)

Jamie Vartan – Arlington (Landmark/The Abbey)

 

Best Lighting Design

James F. Ingalls – Waiting for Godot (Druid/The Abbey)

Ciaran Bagnall – The Pillowman (The Gaiety)

Jason Taylor – The Dumb Waiter (The Gate)

Kris Mooney – King Lear (The Mill Theatre)

Adam Silverman – Arlington (Landmark/The Abbey)

 

Best Sound Design

Carl Kennedy – The Pillowman (The Gaiety)

Greg Clarke – Waiting for Godot (Druid/The Abbey)

Declan Brennan – King Lear (The Mill Theatre)

Helen Atkinson – Arlington (Landmark/The Abbey)

Ivan Birthistle – Tribes (The Gate)

 

Best Costume Design

Peter O’Brien – Private Lives/The Great Gatsby (The Gate & The Gate)

Francis O’Connor – Waiting for Godot (Druid/The Abbey)

Joan O’Clery – The Dumb Waiter (The Gate)

The Costume Room – King Lear (The Mill Theatre)

Special Mention

Bryan Cranston – Network (National Theatre)

Well here we go again, including London in these awards, but an exception must again be made.

Cranston’s multi-faceted turn was a performance that made this play better than its cinematic precursor.

 

The Great Gatsby

When I came back from the Gate I wanted the whole theatrical world at a sort of attention to, providing seats. I wanted no more riotous excursions into costume parties.

Nick Carraway (Marty Rea) has just arrived in West Egg, and is invited by Jay Gatsby (Paul Mescal) to attend one of his Prohibition-be-damned ragers. There he meets his cousin Daisy (Charlene McKenna), her husband Tom Buchanan (Mark Huberman); an old Yale classmate; and their golfer friend Jordan (Rachel O’Byrne). Also floating around the Charleston’d chaos is the shady Meyer Wolfsheim (Owen Roe), Tom’s mistress Myrtle (Aoibheann McCann), her sister Kitty (Kate Gilmore),  Myrtle’s defeated husband George (Ger Kelly), and the protean one-man Repertory (Raymond Scannell). Over the course of an extremely long night (which makes pigswill of the chronology, content, and nuance of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel) Jay meets Daisy, Jay re-woos Daisy, but his insistence on breaking Tom’s romantic hold on her backfires completely, and Jay loses Daisy all over again. And then his business and life too.

Designer Ciaran Bagnall has raised the floor, brought forward the Gate stage; creating a double staircase and a dummy roof; and floored over the back area to create two lobbies; one for piano, one for a bar. Into this space fit maybe 170 people, instead of the usual 371, but that’s probably recouped by selling themed cocktails to the audience; roughly 70% women, who were nearly 100% decked out in full flapper garb. And therein is one problem with this production – as my regular theatre cohort Stephen Errity put it: trying to make a fun night out from one of art’s great downers. Another is the ‘choose your own adventure’ book come to life aspect: we were led into Tom’s NYC apartment, Gatsby’s bedroom, and, after the interval, Wolfsheim’s gambling den. Only the first, mostly using Fitzgerald’s actual words, worked…

Fitzgerald…  If you think his point was decadent parties then you probably didn’t finish the novel, and should be at Film Fatale’s annual Gatsby party at IMMA. Rea and O’Byrne excel at athletically dancing the Charleston, but does it gain enough from the audience playing dress-up next to it to justify staging it this way and not on the stage as Elevator Repair Service did for their choreographed bacchanalia in The Select: The Sun Also Rises? Does it make sense to segue from Carraway’s opening speech to the closing peroration, and repeatedly mash together lines from anywhere, an egregious offender being George’s decontextualised references to God seeing everything? Does it make sense to have George Wilson be a barman, yet still have Tom’s yellow Rolls-Royce that he knows as a mechanic kill Myrtle? Does it make sense to pretend this is one night when Tom, Nick, and Daisy are observed (by some people) travelling to NYC, and Jay and Daisy’s agonised tea thus apparently happens in the wee small hours? We’re into Baz Luhrmann flashy incoherence here before we reach the musical numbers that pad the 2^nd act as if a half-abandoned Moulin Rouge! musical of Gatsby is poking through.

The interval, 80 minutes in, found me sick of standing. 70 minutes later I was aghast that the handful of remaining scenes had been fleshed out by unnecessary musical numbers, the party had definitively gone on too long. Audience interaction had started highly amusingly when actors had to go with Nick being rumoured out of the Midwest by ‘a whole 4 people’, gone downhill with the utterly pointless preparation of the tea service, and degenerated to literal pantomime boos for Tom’s denunciation of the audience as uninvited and uninteresting. Actors bellowing at each other across a milling audience doesn’t synch with large parties being intimate nor make sense for Wolfsheim offering Gatsby a gonnegtion; indeed poor Roe’s main function appeared to be glad-handing groups of theatregoers. Scannell excelled at the piano providing mood music for Daisy and Jay’s fretful tea.

The costumes, designed by Peter O’Brien, are terrific; especially Gatsby’s spiffy pink suit. Yet the point of this show, imported from the Guild of Misrule’s original production with Alexander Wright still directing, seems to be that you, the audience member, dressed in your best flapper gear, are the show as much as the actors. Which rather deflates the great performances: Rea finds all new notes of nervousness as Carraway, who’s not as sardonic as he presents himself in narration, while O’Byrne is incredibly effective as Jordan, registering a disdain for the world which shines through her musical performances, and a fearless McCann renders her sultry Myrtle as the physical embodiment of Nelly Furtado’s ‘Maneater’. Huberman doesn’t have the hulking physique but is a startlingly good Tom replete with habitual dominance (and his moustache and projection reminded me of KH T’*!).

Nobody amidst the rave reviews for this bold and brave use of the Gate space seems willing to acknowledge the atavistic cruelty at work. The Gate audience, as has been widely remarked, is older, there are usually a notable number of walking sticks; and the new regime welcomes them by shouting – there are no seats, dance! What exactly did they do to deserve this opprobrium? They didn’t like Crestfall, which the Irish Times just savaged for depravity. They did like Ralph Fiennes in Faith Healer and Michael Gambon in No Man’s Land. They appreciate opulent costumes, clever set design, and, recently, acclaimed productions of titanic Albee and Murphy classics. Yet for these hanging offences they must be run off the premises, the Gate is trying to run a the-a-tre here! It is strange to burn your audience while feigning bonhomie…

Rea, O’Byrne, McCann, and Huberman were all splendidly cast, but I’d liked to have seen them in a coherent adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

3/5

 

The Great Gatsby continues its run at the Gate until the 16th of September.

The Constant Wife

Alan Stanford directs Somerset Maugham’s 1920s comedy of marital infidelity and hypocrisy to amusing effect, but in a broad manner.

Constance Middleton (Tara Egan Langley) has it all: rich, lovely house, delightful daughter at boarding school. But her friends and relations feel sorry for her. Well, some of them do. Her redoubtable mother Mrs Culver (Belinda Lang) most certainly does not; indeed she has called on her daughter expressly to prevent her spinster daughter Martha (Rachel O’Byrne) informing Constance that her husband John (Simon O’Gorman) is having an affair with Constance’s bubbly and vacuous best friend Marie-Louise (Caoimhe O’Malley). Both of them are surprised when they learn that Constance knew all along, and even more surprised when she manages to convince Marie-Louise’s husband Mortimer (Peter Gaynor) that he is a monstrous cad for suspecting his wife. Little do they realise that Constance has a plan, involving gossip, plausible deniability, and her former beau Bernard (Conor Mullen) just returned from China.

Constance takes a job with her entrepreneur friend Barbara (Ruth McGill), and emancipates herself from economic dependence on her husband; much to his fury. Indeed there’s a lot of comic male bluster in this play. The Constant Wife is quite funny, but is played as slapstick. Gaynor has a fantastic stride of determined and manly apology, while Mullen lurks in a doorway looking back and forth at the adulterous couple with the suspicious gaze of a man who’s just been told what’s going on (and leans back hilariously for one parting warning glance), and O’Gorman nearly blows a gasket in remaining dashed polite to a man he wholeheartedly desires to knock down and set to.  Given Constance’s Shavian speeches on economics and her mother’s Bracknellisms you wonder if Patrick Mason could elicit subtler laughs and trim the third act repetitions.

O’Malley Fassbenders as the callous airhead, and Lang is delightfully withering, but O’Byrne overplays her RP accent somewhat. Eileen Diss’ appropriately airy set design gives us a drawing room flooded with light, and Peter O’Brien pulls out all the stops in designing a whole wardrobe of glorious flapper era outfits for Maugham’s women to model. Programming this as high summer fare, for the second time in a decade, seemed an absurd exemplar of Michael Colgan’s latter sterility as artistic director, and news of his retirement followed soon after. Maugham’s play is good, but can one justify reviving it when the Gate has only produced three Stoppard shows since 1984? Being The Real Thing, and Arcadia twice. We know the Gate needs full houses but couldn’t an exuberant Stoppard like Night and Day, Indian Ink, or Jumpers pack a house too?

The Constant Wife is entertaining, but not of Cowardian calibre. It and the Abbey’s ramshackle The Wake have represented a veritable Scylla and Charybdis of commerce over aesthetics and ideology over aesthetics this summer.

3/5

The Constant Wife continues its run at the Gate Theatre until the 3^rd of September.

An Ideal Husband

Oscar Wilde’s treatment of the related dangers of political corruption and the dangers of puritanical morality returns to the Gate under award-winning Ethan McSweeny’s direction.

Sir Robert Chiltern (Garrett Lombard) is hosting a party as the London season winds down. In a night of general aggravation Sir Robert’s sister Mabel (Siobhan Cullen) is infuriated by the inattention of her erstwhile suitor the foppish Lord Goring (Marty Rea), whose sloth equally enrages his Cabinet minister father Lord Caversham (David Yelland), while Sir Robert’s wife Lady Gertrude Chiltern (Lorna Quinn) is outraged when her friend Lady Markby (Marion O’Dwyer) arrives with Mrs Cheveley (Aoibheann O’Hara); whose latest surname change cleverly hid the identity of a despised schoolmate. Mrs Cheveley immediately blackmails Sir Robert to push through the Commons a speculative canal in Argentina that he knows to be a fraud: either he endorses it and makes her fortune, or she will publish an incriminating letter in which he sold state secrets years before to make his fortune…

Wilde’s curtain almost divides drama and comedy. Robert wrestles with his conscience as the surprisingly wise Goring advocates that he confess to his wife and ‘fight the thing out’ with Cheveley, but Lady Chiltern’s most hysterically puritanical judgements come in this serious first half when she forces Robert to sacrifice his career by refusing to aid Mrs Cheveley, and he hates her for it; not least because she has made him such a moral ideal that he knows he’s already lost her by having done wrong years before he met her. After the curtain Wilde careens towards farce. Marty Rea Fassbenders mightly as Goring: he shrieks with surprise when his stealthy valet Phipps (Simon Coury) surprises him, turns his portrait to the wall after being unnerved by lines on its face, insists on a trivial buttonhole to make himself appear younger, desperately tries to read without glasses, and verbally fences with a sublime David Yelland as his comically disappointed father.

Marion O’Dwyer matches Rea’s tour-de-force with her proto-Lady Bracknell turn as Lady Markby, while Siobhan Cullen’s Mabel is rendered as affected as her soul-mate Goring with her repeated posing to receive a proposal that Goring neglects to make. Under McSweeny’s direction Mrs Cheveley enjoys her dirty work more than I’ve seen before, and Aoibheann O’Hara’s breathy delivery emphasises the pleasure she takes in destroying Gertrude. Lady Chiltern and Robert are the most serious roles in the play, and. Peter O’Brien’s costumes provide Lombard with trappings of office that he wears with aplomb, and he makes Robert sympathetic thru a strangulated Etonian drawl that emphasises his politician’s social-climbing nature. Lorna Quinn makes Gertrude formidable in facing down Mrs Cheveley, but the script prevents her unbending nature being made sympathetic; perhaps why Wilde diverted her downfall toward mistaken identities and purloined letters.

Francis O’Connor’s mobile door-frames allow us see the truth of scenes other characters only superficially observe and Wilde’s script similarly hides pragmatic profundities on morality and politics behind epigrams.

4/5

An Ideal Husband continues its run at the Gate Theatre until the 14^th of June.