THE acid test of the success of a production of Sean O'Casey's vaudevillean tragedy about the venal and romantic world of people in a tenement in Killjoy Square in Dublin during the "troubles" is vested in the final five minutes, when the rumbustious comedy is set aside by the death of a young woman - the author's dramatic slap in the face of audiences who think it's all right to enjoy jokes and illusions about the true state of; a city beset by poverty, deception and political military threat. Lynne Parker's new staging last night failed that test. Uproarious laughter was not slapped into the sorrowful silence of dramatic catharsis.
The laughter had never been exactly uproarious in the first place. It was as if the production had tried to dampen the fun in order to signal, much too far in advance, the sombre ending. Barry Barnes's Donal Davoren (an admittedly lost dramatic cause given the impossibly phoney words granted by the author to his own poetic voice) threw the melodramatic musings away while missing the mischievous playfulness of his encounter with the naive Minnie Powell (a pert Deirdre Molloy), and Owen Roe's Seumas Shields buried his comical and perceptive rhetoric in tones that were far too mundanely conversational.
The vaudeville was brought to life by Eanna MacLiam's strutting Tommy Owens, and that comic theatrical life was sustained by Maureen Potter's vaunting Mrs Henderson and Des Keogh's pathetically pompous Mr Gallogher.
But the laughter subsided again after that and not even the hollow boastfulness of Martin Murphy's drunken Adolph us Grigson (why do indigenous Dublin Orangemen of O'Casey's time still have to be played with Northern accents?) could resuscitate the dramatically anarchic comedy. Ingrid Craigie's rightly frightened Mrs Grigson had no comic base against which to forewarn of tragedy at that stage.
Attention to the detail of setting and costume was scant in a play that still depends on its period for its dramatic authenticity: Anto Nolan's Mr Maguire was dressed as nobody of the time could dress and Des Nealon's Mr Mulligan was attired in a carefully-soiled dress coat. Kathy Strachan's Geogian tenement room, in which the action takes place, presented an architectural impossibility, with a door facing unlikely windows, while Tina McHugh's lighting offered the implausibility of light streaming in from the windows which was never obscured either by passing players or by the blankets set up by the cowardly inhabitants to shield themselves from the real world outside their vaudeville existence.
