Jim Nolan's long-awaited and most welcome latest work is not the sort of play to draw whoops and cheers and be forgotten. It is a richly-layered drama to be savoured quietly, its content to be stored in the memory and revisited time and again to retrieve its subtle wisdom, and it and its performance thoroughly deserved the instant and respectful standing ovation which it drew on Monday night in Waterford.
It is, of course, about redemption. But this is not redemption on the grand scale. Rather, it is to be found in the small acceptance of imperfection and a huge act of self-forgiveness and, since the author uses music to moderate the transactions of the drama, the play might be theatrically described as the antithesis of Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert: not as grand, perhaps, but no less truthful.
We meet Eddie Tansey and his father Sylvie in the salvage shop where they work and live. Sylvie is drunk and angry and foul-mouthed, Eddie mild in the face of provocation. Their business is the rehabilitation of seemingly waste material into objects for which the timber, or the glass or the bric-a-brac might never have been intended. But their passions appear to lie elsewhere, in the local seaside small town Garris Brass Band, over which Sylvie has ruled for nearly 40 years and which Eddie apparently deserted many years before when, maybe, his wife Kathleen left him or he left her.
Eddie has recently returned home from his digs above an amusement arcade, where Rita has been his landlady, and maybe something more than that. His daughter Katie returns home too, and Stephen Kearney, the salvage shop's only "staff", who never deserted either the shop or the band, is always diffidently at hand. As they talk, the author very slowly reveals what may have happened in the past to leave Eddie and Sylvie, as one of them avers, drowning in their own poison. And one component of the events which introduced the toxin seems to be the local business-man Josie Costello, who may yet lead them to a false redemption.
Ben Barnes has directed the piece unobtrusively well, leaving the sometimes over-stated purpose of the play clear and keeping its complex construction perfectly emotionally (and humorously) intact. Ben Hennessy's elaborate setting echoes nicely the bric a brac of the lives of the characters and is excellently lit by Nick McCall. Niall Toibin makes a welcome return to drama as the dying Sylvie, who never quite gives up the fight or the band which the wicked Reilly appears to be taking away from him. John Olahan gives one the performances of his life as the anguished, loving and distraught Eddie, and Ray McBride is the steadfast Stephen, as faithfully reliable in character as Stephen must have been in his unambitious life. Emily Nagle is luminously youthful as Katie, and Caroline Gray is sensitively compelling as Rita, the "other woman". David Heap makes a chillingly effective appearance as Costello and all the characterisation are perfectly understated in this quietly and solidly rewarding evening.
