Sara Keatingreviews An Ideal Husbandat Abbey Theatre and The Odd Coupleat The Mill Theatre
An Ideal HusbandAbbey Theatre
THERE IS more than politics at stake in Oscar Wilde's 1895 play An Ideal Husband, which raises questions about private morality and public conscience that are still startlingly pertinent today.
While the play is layered with Wilde's trademark witticisms and throwaway frivolity, in the hands of director Neil Bartlett due attention is given to the important questions that it raises too. An Ideal Husbandwas written at a time when Wilde's own reputation was hanging in the balance, and by the time the play's opening run was concluded, Wilde had been arrested for "gross indecency".
Bartlett brings the co-incidence of these circumstances to bear upon this Abbey Theatre production by giving the easily dismissable society comedy a subtle but serious edge.
Bartlett's production is starkly of the period rather than decadent. The traditional sumptuous Victorian set is stripped back to a bare and cavernous black stage, and, although it is slowly filled with the gorgeous paraphernalia of a party as the audience files in, designer Rae Smith ensures that we are always aware that the set is merely dressing the stage.
Bartlett's decision to use a gallery of waiting staff as an on-stage audience enhances our awareness of a society obsessed with performance and constantly being judged. Spoken stage directions, direct audience address, and the command of sound design, lighting cues with the characters' finger-clicks, brings a further meta-theatrical effect to Bartlett's inspired interpretation of the play.
The ensemble cast in the first scene put on an excellent show: wheezing in and out of the exhausting sequence of insults and verbal jousts with breathless exhilaration.
However, it is in the lead roles that the actors are really allowed to make their mark: Derbhle Crotty revels in Mrs Cheevley's villainy; Deirdre Donnelly commands an entire scene with her litany of libellous complaints; and Mark O'Halloran sidles across the stage with all the louche confidence of studied idleness.
Natalie Radmall-Quirke, meanwhile, commands an understated emotional poise as the virtuous Lady Chiltern, whose stiff attitudes to morality will, by necessity, be redefined. Although the forced happy ending exposes the unsettling gender politics of Victorian times, neither Bartlett, as director, nor a composed but seething Radmall-Quirke, shirk from allowing the uncomfortable implications of these attitudes to resonate with the audience.
This uneasy return to the status quo, reminds us that "no one" - and no society - "should be entirely judged by their past". Bartlett's brilliant contemporary understanding of Wilde's play makes doubly sure of that.
Runs until September 27th.
The Odd CoupleThe Mill Theatre, Dundrum
Neil Simon's classic comedy The Odd Couplehas been translated for contemporary effect by a group of Irish female comics. Taking the lead from Simon's own 1985 female version of the play, the opening and closing bonding scenes unfold over gin and tonics and a game of Trivial Pursuit. The cast's comedy improvisation skills, meanwhile, are applied to evoking a Dublin locale, with references to the changing landscape of the city thrown in alongside colloquial slang.
Formerly of The Nualas, Sue Collins and Anne Gildea take on the lead roles that were so famously incarnated by Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau; Oscar, the slovenly sportswriter, becomes Olivia, a slovenly sportswriter; Felix, the fastidious, anal newspaperman, becomes Fiona, an anal, frugal housewife.
Where the original premise exploited gender stereotypes at a time when feminism was just emerging, the themes do not translate well to a contemporary landscape, and even less well to the contemporary women's world. The situation comedy is just not as funny when the particularities of male bonding, masculinity and machoism are taken out of the equation.
Meanwhile, subjecting female stereotypes to the same circumstances seems implausible and verges on offensive.
The patchy performances do not help, and many of the comics-turned-actors seem deeply uncomfortable with the physical aspects of their roles.
The exceptions are Sue Collins, who exudes a natural confidence with the emotional demands of the script as well as the comic ones, and Gene Rooney, whose pitch-perfect comic timing mines laughs out of every throwaway line.
The appearance of the sex-starved Spanish neighbours at the start of the second act momentarily restores Simon's comedy to its original brilliance, as we are allowed to see the female protagonists spark off against their male counterparts in a series of wonderful puns and reversals. Peter Byrne and Dermot Byrne steal the show in this regrettably short scene.
And as the finale segues into a cliched Cindy Lauper number - you know which one - the idea that "women are finally making progress", as Olivia puts it, seems truly laughable.
Runs until August 23rd
