Fintan O'Toole was in the Town Hall Theatre, in Galway...
The Tinker's Wedding & The Well Of The Saints
Town Hall Theatre, Galway
When John Synge died, in 1909, his papers were brimming with sketches for the plays he would never write. Ranging from a "Rabelaisian rhapsody" to a drama about the 1798 rising, they are among the most melancholy fragments in the history of drama, the stillborn children of a unique imagination. They make it all the stranger that Irish theatre has been so neglectful of the small brood that Synge managed to produce in his too-short lifetime. Garry Hynes's project of staging the entire Synge canon for Druid is a belated but immensely welcome restitution.
It is not hard to understand why the two plays that make up the second instalment of the project, The Tinker's Wedding and The Well Of The Saints, have been consigned to the margins of the repertoire. Both are, essentially, anti-religious. The Tinker's Wedding was considered by Yeats to be too dangerous for the Abbey to stage. The Well Of The Saints was staged, but only because its parable of mankind's inability to stomach too much reality is a subtler and less direct assault on religious faith. They are companion pieces in the best sense, with a broad thematic unity but a complete contrast of styles, the latter replaying the farce of the former as a kind of tragicomedy.
The Tinker's Wedding is a Protestant atheist's fantasy of the wild Irish breaking free of the tyranny of the Church. The tinkers - the lugubrious Michael Byrne (Gary Lydon), his rip-roaring mother, Mary (Marie Mullen), and his fierce lover, Sarah Casey (Norma Sheahan) - are in imminent danger of succumbing to respectability. Sarah wants herself and Michael to be married. She waylays a pompous and venal priest (a marvellously vivid caricature by Diarmuid de Faoite) and half-cajoles, half-bullies him into agreeing to perform the ceremony. When the plan falters, and the priest is enraged, he is trussed up and imprisoned in a sack.
Hynes understands that the whole play is an excuse for this moment. For all its verbal fireworks this is a play about an action: the priest squirming in a sack like a piglet, the smelly old woman squatting over his face. Hynes goes unflinchingly for this jugular, and Mullen, Sheahan and Lydon enact it with a luxuriant relish that makes this still, 100 years on, a garishly shocking and gloriously anarchic play.
Francis O'Connor and Kathy Strachan's superb designs make The Tinker's Wedding a riot of motley. The Well Of The Saints, by contrast, is washed in drab greys and murky browns, picking up on Synge's statement that he wanted it to be "like a monochrome painting, all in shades of one colour". The Well Of The Saints is constructed around tensions. A stark, restrained story is saturated in rich language. A symbolic minimalism that heavily influenced Beckett is laced with medieval
lustiness. The challenge is to contain the contrasts without slipping towards either side of the equation. Hynes's formidable production mostly meets it.
Synge's parable of faith and truth is clear enough. The Saint cures the blindness of Martin (Mick Lally) and Mary (Marie Mullen). Their belief in the other's beauty is shattered on sight, and their relationship is destroyed. When their sight fades and the Saint comes to cure them again, they choose to remain blind. If anything, the parable is too straightforward and the structure too schematic. It is thus crucial that the fabulous language should lash against the granite of the structure and generate the drama that powers the play.
This is all the more crucial because The Well Of The Saints doesn't offer the usual easy connections to an audience. It is set, vaguely, "one or more centuries ago", but, as Hynes rightly senses, it really unfolds in the endless realms of the past. She and the designers present effectively three simultaneous time frames. The Saint (Domhnall Gleeson) is a figment from the early Middle Ages, Martin and Mary are broadly 19th century and the surrounding community roughly 1920s. All carry with them the resonances of these various times.
As a way of highlighting the shades within the monochrome, this works splendidly. There was, on the opening night, some lingering sense that, having been taken apart and put together again, the disparate elements have not yet fully knit together, and Lally's potent presence is occasionally blurred by hesitancies with the language. The ensemble playing is terrific, however, and the pacing of the action masterly. Mullen, moreover, adding two dazzling performances here to her previous fruitful encounters with Synge, emerges as the greatest living stage interpreter of his work. Bold, mischievous, at ease with the flow of words and the stillness of silence, intelligently alive at every moment, she brings out all the qualities that make Synge such a compelling force even now.
Run here until September 18th; then Brockagh Resource Centre, Laragh, Glendalough, September 21st-25th; Glór, Ennis, September 27th-October 2nd; Tivoli Theatre, Dublin, October 4th-9th; An Grianán, Letterkenny, October 11th-16th
