Along the thin line: Dublin comedy in recent Fishamble and other plays

Jim Culleton

Dublin writers have a strong reputation for comic writing or for writing that captures the humour alongside the pain and anguish of life. This is true of contemporary Dublin playwrights, such as Conor McPherson, Mark O’Rowe, and Roddy Doyle, or twentieth-century writers such as Sean O’Casey, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, or further back again to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, or the satirist Jonathan Swift. I am going to explore how I think the comedy in some ‘Dublin’ plays I have directed has worked.

It is fascinating to witness how Dublin audiences respond to seeing themselves captured on stage when watching plays set in Dublin. It is also interesting to see how, on occasions, the Dublin humour has been received differently outside Ireland’s capital city.

The comedy in The Pride of Parnell Street (2007) by Sebastian Barry, Noah and the Tower Flower (2007) by Sean McLoughlin and Silent (2011) by Pat Kinevane, all of which I directed for Fishamble: The New Play Company, is often perilously close to tragedy and sadness, and can comment on society in more powerful ways than strictly ‘serious’ drama. The master of contemporary comedy of manners, Bernard Farrell, and Elaine Murphy, a relative newcomer with wonderful comic insight, both use comedy to teach us about ourselves; we stand to learn unpleasant truths about our behaviour in Farrell’s Bookworms (2010) and Murphy’s Shush (2013), both of which I directed for the Abbey.

The Pride of Parnell Street, Sebastian Barry

In The Pride of Parnell Street, Sebastian Barry captured the fun, resilience, sadness and pride of living in Dublin’s inner city during the 1990s, as Janet and Joe share their experiences with the audience through a series of interconnecting monologues. The sense of recognition from Dublin audiences was sometimes overwhelming, with lifelong residents of Parnell Street saying that it captured their lives, in all their joy and heartache, perfectly. Janet’s line, ‘why would we live in Dublin, iffen we didn’t adore her?’ which was delivered by Mary Murray, smiling and nodding to the audience, always seemed to bring a smile of recognition from Dublin audiences. In other places too, audiences enjoyed the feeling that they were, for one night only, honorary Dubliners, and often seemed to nod back to Janet in agreement.

The play is full of sadness and resilience, coping with the fact, as Janet says about her husband, Joe, who is dying, ‘that it was only life that done him in and made a fool a him, like it does us all’. And yet, shortly before he dies, audiences would laugh as Joe (originally played by Karl Shiels, then by Aidan Kelly in the 2009 New York run and Joe Hanley in the 2011 revival) bemoans the fact that, ‘a Dublin man can’t hardly make a living at the robbing anymore. It’s a terrible thing when a traditional trade goes to the dogs like that, yeh?’

Within this play there is lots of humour, sometimes inspired by the divide that can exist between the Northside and Southside areas of Dublin. Janet comments on her Northsider mother-in-law coming to visit her on the Southside:

So she crosses over O’Connell Bridge like a traveller crossing into a foreign territory. She was probably surprised there was no Customs on the bridge, and that no one asked to see her passport.

When the production toured to the U.S. or in Europe, we worried that the strong Dublin accents might make it difficult for foreign audiences to understand. In New York, during the first preview, we tried slowing the rate of delivery a little to make the accents more comprehensible, but we found that this affected the rhythm of the play which is so much a part of Sebastian’s writing. So we reinstated the usual pace and timing and, as the truthfulness and pathos of the play is arguably as much in the rhythm of the words as in their meaning, the audience engaged fully with the characters, even though some local references were lost (when it is explained that a ‘wheelier’ is a ‘buggy’, audiences in the U.S. would sometimes say ‘oh, a stroller’ for example).

In Germany, the production had a live simultaneous translator who was concerned that German words tend to be longer than English ones. He commented that, if he didn’t have time to translate every word, this would be fine, once the timing of the German version hit the audience’s ear with the same rhythm as the actors on stage.

Noah and the Tower Flower, Sean McLoughlin

Similar to The Pride of Parnell Street, we found that maintaining the authentic rhythm was also crucial when Fishamble brought Sean McLoughlin’s play Noah and the Tower Flower to New York. This was a romance set in Ballymun, with Darren Healy as Noah and Natalie played by Mary Murray. Mary worked hard in rehearsals on ensuring her accent was true to the Northside area of Ballymun and didn’t veer into the Southside suburb of Ballyfermot. The nuances of this were lost on any audiences outside Dublin or sometimes, indeed, in the city. But the accents and the rhythm were the same in New York performances as in Dublin. One American patron turned to me at the end of a preview there and said, ‘I didn’t understand what everything meant, but I sure understood those two people love each other. I’m going home now to my gaff.’

There is lots of humour in this play, as the relationship develops between Noah, who has just been released from prison, and Natalie, who is a recovering heroin addict. Despite the grim situation in which the characters live, there is great fun in Noah’s impersonations of Robert de Niro, or his pretence that Westlife is his favourite band, or his fake Oscar-winning speech. When Noah tells Natalie about drinking on the job while cutting grass for Dublin Corporation, Natalie scolds him by saying, ‘Shouldn’t of been drinkin’ on the job’, to which he responds, incredulously, ‘It was a fuckin’ Friday’, which always got a great reaction.

After a violent exchange towards the end of the play, Noah leaves to buy vodka and flowers for Natalie. She has a moment to herself and says, ‘Ah fuck.’ The audience thinks, perhaps, that she regrets continuing the relationship with Noah, whom she fancies but who has also shown examples of violent outbursts, and that she is going to change her mind. Instead, she says, ‘I forgot to tell him to get orange juice’, in a beautiful last line that is comic, sad and hopeful, all at the same time, as our hearts go out to Natalie and her struggle to cope with life without drugs.

Silent, Pat Kinevane

In Silent, Pat Kinevane captures the grittiness of a homeless man living on the streets of Dublin. This is an often dark and angry one-person play, performed by the playwright, but with great humour, too, as the character of Tino copes with his homeless life and mental health issues:

Hello and welcome to the mental health hotline. If you are obsessive-compulsive, press one, repeatedly…if you have multiple personalities, press 3, 4, 5 and 6.

In general, the casual nature with which Tino can insult or threaten someone is accepted quite readily by Dublin and Irish audiences, but is considered darker by many audiences outside Ireland. For instance, when Tino has a yoghurt drink and asks someone in the audience whether it is ‘creamy or watery’, the audience member responds (usually) with his or her opinion. Tino then jokes that, if the person is wrong, he will come down and beat the person up, which is delivered with a twinkle in the eye and usually greeted by laughter in Ireland, but is often viewed by other audiences as more shocking or dangerous.

Perhaps we treat threatened violence too lightly in Ireland, or accept quite readily the thinness of the line between comedy and tragedy. When Silent was performed in New York, Ben Brantley commented in the New York Times, ‘the principle reason Tino rivets our focus is the feeling that he needs us to exist – and, to be honest, that he might turn violent if we ignore him’, reflecting the menace behind some darkly comic lines. The sinister joke about beating someone up is often changed outside Ireland to, ‘I’ll come down there and rob your purse’!

At another point in Silent, Tino remarks that ‘Cork and France are joined at the hip … mostly, the accents – identical!’ He then continues to compare the two accents, showing how ‘le cigarette’ and ‘de cigarette’ are both formed in the throat. In Ireland, this comparison is always considered amusing, as Irish audiences probably enjoy being compared to the sophisticated French but, when we performed the play in Paris, the French audience was less convinced about their way of speaking being compared to Corkonians!

Much of the play’s humour comes from comments on characters’ prejudices and snobbishness, such as Tino describing nasty Noelette Amberson who runs a boutique, ‘a kip of a shop that sold some of the ugliest clobber north of Gibraltar’, or an imagined woman named ‘Foxrock Fanny’ who is:

all spray tan and veneers, posin at Punchestown races with a huge fuckin ostrich feather stickin out of her botox forehead and round her neck [she] wears the screw tops, vintage couture, photo on the back pages of Social and Personal magazine and delighted with herself that she is not now, nor ever will be, a hobo.

The humour has a dark, savage edge, as he talks about people who have contributed to his homelessness and depression. Pat and myself try to keep the tone of the play light in places so that, when the laughter dies down, the issues of the play are felt by audiences in a powerful and moving way. It is a great pleasure to sit among audiences at the production and get a sense of people engaging in a very honest way with the issues of mental health illness and homelessness.

There are some moments in particular that do unite audiences through laughter, albeit a dark, sad laugh. Tino tells the audience about Morty and Molly Mackey, two ‘coffin chasers … the folly the box gang, who love death’. At the end of the play, following a very dark section when Tino has died and is describing his funeral, he mentions that there were very few mourners but that ‘Morty and Molly Mackey were there’ and audiences all over the world share a laugh of release and appreciate the chance to smile.

Bookworms, Bernard Farrell

Bernard Farrell has been creating hugely successful plays about the foibles, pretensions and frustrations of the middle classes for the past three decades. I worked with him on the Abbey’s premiere production of Bookworms, about a book-club evening that goes disastrously wrong when men are invited to join for the first time, and tensions build between the hostess’s builder husband, Larry (played by Phelim Drew), and his bank manager, Robert (played by Louis Lovett). Bernard is superb at creating an environment in which he can trap his characters in a room, so they cannot leave until the action has unfolded completely. I was so impressed by how thoroughly he had worked out which doors can open, which ones lock from outside, and where the doors lead, so that every time someone is locked out or let in, it is consistent and authentic within the world of the play.

Marion O’Dwyer played the book club hostess, Ann, and she referred in rehearsals to a classic saying that, ‘if you leave a door open, the comedy escapes’. There is a lot of truth in that when it comes to a play by Bernard, such that the humour is often based on who is in the room, and cannot escape. Even in Act IV, which is a sort of coda to the play, Bernard has cleverly ensured his characters’ motivations require them to stay in the room until attempted apologies have been made. In rehearsals, for instance, we wondered why Robert would not leave after being disgraced in the previous scene, but Bernard has very thoroughly worked out that Robert’s wife, Jennifer (played in the original run by Karen Egan and by Donna Dent in the revival), needs to maintain her dignity by having Robert apologize to Dorothy (Deirdre Donnelly), an influential book-club member, and Robert does not dare contradict his wife at this stage of the events.

One of Bernard’s great skills is to create fun and comedy from people’s insecurities and fears. The fun always points up the tensions and conflicts within the drama. With the character of Larry, for instance, great fun is created in his confusion over Dorothy’s many bereavements, and his futile attempts to console her. This points up Larry’s embarrassment and worry about taking part in the book club. Also, Larry’s attempt at literary criticism, having just completed a quick search on the internet for Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, perfectly captures his unease, as he pretends he is comfortable in this literary gathering, in order to try to improve his relationship with Robert:

… and I want to say now that I do know who Sylvia Plath is … (almost a memorised performance). She was married to Ted Hughes who was the Poet Laureate and her poems are world famous, poems like “Blackberrying” and “Crossing The River” and … and … (stops) … and another one … and her poems deal with confessional poetry about details of her own life and she committed suicide by putting her head in the oven, just as Virginia Woolf also did, except she done it by walking into a river and that was the point I was making that they both had that in common, apart from their writings and that’s what makes us always think of them together.

Bernard lets the audience in on Larry and Ann’s worries from the start of the play, so the audience shares their predicament, and cares for them. Even when Ann reveals to Dorothy that she may have had an inappropriate encounter with Robert, we hope that Larry does not find out and that Ann’s secret will remain safe in the final scene. We know Ann is hiding her diary, which contains incriminating entries, but Larry does not know this. The comedy in this section develops as he sits on the armchair where her diary is hidden and shifts on the cushion covering the diary. She panics more and more, and I always sensed, when watching a performance, that the audience shared her fear and hoped she would get away with it! Bernard described the cushion scene as the classic sketch with the lover hiding in the wardrobe and the husband opens the door to hang up his jacket but does not see the hidden lover, even though the audience does. Bernard allows the audience to see all of Ann and Larry’s attempts to cover up for embarrassing encounters, so we share their vulnerability.

Bernard often makes great comic use of his offstage characters, who sometimes act as a sort of deus ex machina, with secrets revealed gradually, as well as the ability to solve problems from afar. In Bookworms, Larry and Ann’s daughter, Aisling (played by Liz Fitzgibbon), appears from Australia via Skype, while Larry’s brother, Vincent (Michael Glenn Murphy), is only seen in glimpses during Act I, until he arrives in Act II to create havoc, unwittingly. Aisling makes some interrupted appearances in the first half and then takes control in the second, providing honest and insightful observations on the insecurities and deceits of the characters.

Bernard has a great ability to allow a character cut to the core of a dilemma with a pithy line that allows an audience a sense of release after the tension of the scene. Dorothy’s line towards the end, ‘The men didn’t fit in’, always brought the house down, as the audience enjoyed the succinctness with which she summed up the mayhem. Ann’s next line, ‘True’, was often not heard in the laughter, so we decided to leave a pause instead, and Dorothy said the next line, ‘Men always fight’, when the laughter died down.

Bernard was very responsive to what happened in rehearsals and in performance, and made small but very effective changes, as necessary, to help the action move continually in the right direction. For instance, during rehearsals, he cut parts of the scene in which Ann and Dorothy discuss what Ann revealed during a drunken conversation at a previous book-club evening, so as not to create red herrings for the audience, but only to develop plot twists that will have a satisfying payoff later in the play. Before the revival of the production in 2012, Bernard went to the Abbey’s archive department to watch the DVD of a performance from the original run in 2010, tweaking lines, adding and subtracting words to make sure the audience is not a split second ahead of or behind the action.

The comedy in this play also works because Bernard establishes the tensions, dilemmas and sense of what is at stake in the play very early on, then complications grow as the action unfolds, reach a climax and ultimately get resolved. He exploits the tensions that come from the characters’ differences, creating patterns and speech rhythms that vary for each character. He has a strong sense of visual comedy too, feeling that the actor playing Jennifer should be taller than the other women, so she is visually intimidating.

We explored what happened offstage between Robert and Jennifer to change their mood between scenes, and while this helped the actors to flesh out and clarify their emotional journey through the play, Bernard was very interesting in rehearsals about the way in which characters in a comedy need to be fully rounded, three-dimensional people, but that their reactions should be immediate and directly in response to the action involved, even if this seems momentarily out of character to their behaviour in the rest of the play – in the same way that, in real life, all of us sometimes behave out-of-character in certain extreme or unusual situations, I suppose.

Shush, Elaine Murphy

Elaine Murphy’s first play, Little Gem, took audiences by storm, as it explored the lives of three generations of Dublin women to great comic effect through a series of interconnecting monologues. Her second full-length play, Shush, also explores the lives of a group of Dublin women, and is written entirely in snappy, inventive and very funny dialogue.

The action centres on Breda (played in the Abbey production by Deirdre Donnelly), who is going through a crisis in her life, and the visit one evening of her friends (Barbara Brennan, Ruth Hegarty and Eva Bartley) and neighbour Ursula (Niamh Daly) who are determined to give her a birthday party, whether she likes it or not. The visit is more like a Mafia-style intervention than a social call, as Breda’s friends try to work out how bad things are for her, and do their best to cheer her up. Breda is experiencing a lot of change in her life, something she had not anticipated having to cope with in her 60s. Her husband has left her, her son has emigrated, she is being forced to take early retirement, and has a number of health problems. The play opens with her contemplating suicide, sitting at a table with a bottle of vodka and pills in her hand. As in much comedy, there is a thin line between darkness and light. The opening of the play is grim, then one of the first lines of the play is Breda reading a text message she receives – ‘Happy Birthday from the O2 network’ – which always got a huge laugh in performance. Similarly, toward the end of the play, during a conversation about coping with grief, Breda says, ‘You know, there’s more chance of us dying in a plane crash than meeting someone at our age’, to which Irene responds, ‘That’s not true because you won’t even get on a plane, Breda’, beautifully undercutting the poignant conversation that has just preceded it. Then Breda’s son rings her and she ends the phone call by telling him, ‘I love you, I’m so happy for you, son’, and, after a brief interjection at the other end of the line from Colm, she protests ‘I only had two vodkas’, again using comedy very adeptly to undercut the sentiment and emotion.

Ultimately, it is the truthfulness and honesty with which Elaine writes about depression, grief and resilience in the face of adversity that makes the play work and provides the comedy that goes hand in hand with the serious subject matter. Clare’s attempts to avoid drinking alcohol are all the more funny because she is trying to keep her pregnancy a secret; Irene being referred to as a black widow spider is funnier because she has experienced such sadness with the deaths of three husbands; Marie’s quips about keeping her sex life active by taking ‘the Micra down to Dollymount Strand the odd night’ are amusing because we know of her marital problems in the past.

The play is full of great Dublin humour, like when Ursula (who has baked a particularly horrible birthday cake for Breda) asks how she should get revenge on her cheating husband and Breda replies, ‘Poison the fucker’, to which Marie suggests, ‘You could bake him a cake’; or when Marie suggests it would suit Breda if her husband (who has also been unfaithful) died, and Breda replies with retorts such as, ‘God forbid the bastard would do something useful’, and, later, by asserting, ‘If he thinks he’s selling my house to fund fucking South Fork he’s another thing coming.’

As in The Pride of Parnell Street, Noah and the Tower Flower, Silent and Bookworms, Shush creates comedy from snobbishness and class distinction. Ursula is considered ‘very affected’ by Marie and has moved in next door to Breda, in a typically working/middle-class suburb. A lot of humour ensues through tensions between Ursula and Marie, such as when Ursula reveals she has had to make cutbacks to deal with financial pressures, then Marie responds by suggesting Ursula should sell her jeep and ‘get yourself a little Punto or something’, at which Ursula is horrified and replies, ‘I said we were broke, not destitute.’

Postscript

As I write this essay in September 2013, Fishamble has just produced Guaranteed! by Colin Murphy, directed by Conall Morrison, a play about the Irish bank guarantee, and is preparing to revive the production. A play about the grim realities surrounding the decision by the Irish government to bail out the banks might not seem like a very funny experience. But audiences watching it laughed uproariously at statements which, with hindsight, we now know to have been untrue. The laughter may be tinged with pain and regret, but the need to laugh at recent events, and demand answers, when the laughter dies away, is a strong one.

Guaranteed! is based on a tiny play that Colin wrote for Fishamble’s Tiny Plays for Ireland project in 2012/2013. A number of other tiny plays in that production demonstrated the power of comedy to create social satire. These include The Nation’s Assets by Michelle Read, about two fictional NAMA workers having sex in the photocopying room; The Straight Talk by Keith Farnan, in which a man tries to withdraw his money from a bank with hilarious and devastating results; and I Stand Here Before You by Tom Swift, about a politician’s words being ‘translated’ by his interpreter. Like Guaranteed!, the first two plays poked fun at the world of finance and economics and Tom Swift’s play satirised politics, making us laugh and ask questions in equal measure. The audience reaction suggested that the effect of satire is as powerful as it was when (that other) Swift was writing three hundred years ago.

The audience’s laughter at these plays, and in all the plays discussed here, never diminished the seriousness of the message or theme at the core of the play. Instead, the comedy allowed the actors and audience to share a moment of hilarity or amusement, after which the audience’s sense of outrage or regret or empathy for the characters on stage was released fully.

In great plays, there is often a thin line between darkness and light, comedy and tragedy, pain and joy. In the plays explored in this essay, I think it is the way in which the playwrights navigate that line, and allow us to laugh before we are plunged into sadness, that creates something special in the dialogue between the performers and the audience. Then, although audiences can react differently due to geographical circumstances, the play will connect with audiences, wherever they are.

Extract From: For the Sake of Sanity: Doing things with humour in Irish performance, edited by Eric Weitz (2014)

Cross Reference: Essays on Companies like Rough Magic and Blue Raincoat, Anu Productions

See Also: Essay by Farrell