Lovers at Versailles Spring Awakening

Lovers at Versailles is reviewed by Fintan O'Toole and Spring Awakening is reviewed by Gerry Colgan today's Irish Times.

Long, long ago, there was a time when the Abbey stage was filled with plays about ineffectual shopkeepers, spinster daughters who pass up their one chance of marriage because their mammies won't let them, and contrived happy endings in which the spurned beau reappears to offer a second chance. The drama was of the kind where, in moments of crisis, someone always puts the kettle on. The jokes were generated by the repetition at strategic intervals of the fixed number of predictable quirks that came ready-

How long ago was all that exactly? Well, to be precise, Wednesday night, when Bernard Farrell's Lovers at Versailles opened at the Abbey. It is an extremely strange event, like one of those living museums where unemployed actors pretend to be Vikings or ancient Celts. Welcome to Blythe World, where audiences can experience what it was like to go to the theatre in the days when Ernest Blythe reigned supreme and the harmless domestic comedies of George Shiels, Louis D'Alton and John McCann kept bad thoughts at bay.

It is all the stranger because Farrell's reputation rests on two admirable qualities: his accuracy as a chronicler of middle-class mores and his ability to unleash a dark anarchy within the apparently banal confines of mundane lives. From his first Abbey play, I Do Not Like Thee, Doctor Fell, in 1979, to his last one, Kevin's Bed, in 1998, he has often combined these qualities into a potent cocktail. It is deeply puzzling, therefore, that our finest observer of urban middle-class life should produce a play in 2002 that, except for its last 10 minutes, could have been written in 1952.

Social comedy demands credibility, and the basic problem with Lovers at Versailles is that we are given no reason to believe in its central character, Anna. The play is set in "the present in suburban Dublin". Anna ages in its course from late 20s to late 30s, suggesting that the early scenes to which we continually return take place sometime around 1992. Yet we have to believe that an intelligent, competent woman in her late 20s at that time is so hopelessly dominated by her harridan of a mother that she leaves her much-loved husband-to-be literally standing at the altar.

Even if Farrell gave us some reason to believe this - and he doesn't - we then have to ask why we should care about a character who is a mere cipher for someone else's hang-ups. In the course of a rather long evening, we actually learn very little either about Anna or about her parents, her snooty sister Isobel, or her boyfriend David.

Each character has a single, unchanging quality. Anna is a mouse. Isobel is a stuck-up, selfish bitch. Mammy is a dried-up, selfish bitch. Daddy is a nice, harmless old codger. David is a nice, harmless young codger. Isobel's husband Tony is unimaginably stupid. And the comedy, such as it is, is sealed up in these packages. Mammy is forever giving withering looks. Daddy is always forgetting David's name. Tony is a bottomless well of numbing stupidity.

All of this has obvious consequences. One is that Mark Lambert's cast is operating well within its comfort zone. Any competent actor can do this sort of stuff while half the brain is still working out the last clue to a crossword puzzle. Only a genius, on the other hand, could make it remotely exciting. And while Tina Kellegher as Anna, Barbara Brennan as the mother and Vincent McCabe as the father are all actors who have a spark of genius within them, none of them finds a reason to go beyond competence here.

The other consequence is that a play as inert as this one can only be resolved by a plot contrivance that makes the old deus ex machina of the Greeks seem subtle. The descending goddess in this case is Jeananne Crowley, and such is the dullness of what has gone before that the outrageous sentimentality of the device she delivers is inordinately thrilling.

•Lovers at Versailles runs until May 4th. To book, phone 01-8787222

Spring Awakening, Pavillion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire

In the spring of Frank Wedekind's play, written in the 1890s, the young men's fancies turn not so lightly to thoughts of lust. The untutored sex drive, repressed and insistent, fills their minds with ravenous curiosity and immature theories. In the Germany of that day, talk of sex was regarded as sinful, and its practice outside of marriage as criminal; a mindset familiar to the Irish.

Two teenage boys are at the heart of the play, here adapted by Ted Hughes. Melchior is strong-minded and follows his instincts, a dangerous path to take in that time and place. His friend, Moritz, already in trouble with his studies, is tormented by his ignorance. The girls are also kept in the dark, and given to romantic speculation. But when Wendla becomes embroiled with Melchior, the result is pregnancy.

The young people's mothers are innately sympathetic, but unable to withstand social pressures, while the stern fathers condemn and disown their sons. Moritz kills himself, Wendla dies of a botched abortion and Melchior is sent to a reformatory, itself a hotbed of sexual perversion.

Director Theresia Guschlbauer (for Clonmel's Galloglass company) uses masks and puppets in her production, with a vocal soundtrack by Susan McKeown of melancholy Gaelic provenance. These are not fully integrated into the action, although they do generate an atmosphere of near-impressionism at times. The masks, in particular, give some scenes and characters an archetypal quality that stamps a general relevance on them. Moggie Douglas's inventive set design and Nick Anton's lighting are atmospheric.

Changed social attitudes - but only in the last generation or so - have superseded much of the narrow-mindedness reflected here. But the director has preserved the sense of time and place, and the audience is free to observe these tragic events as a distant reality, and to reflect on its own recent past and not entirely liberated present. The acting, led by Andy Moore, Ewan Downie and Emma Moohan, is generally excellent, although with irritating moments of inaudibility.

•Spring Awakening runs until March 9th. To book, phone 01-2312929