Lay Me Down Softly

Project Arts Centre

It doesn’t matter who throws the punches – every character in a boxing drama must ask what they’re fighting for. Variations of the same question face the heroes of epic myth and – more modestly – anyone who gets up in the morning.

Perhaps that’s why Billy Roche’s scuffed and nostalgic work of 2008 warmly depicts small-town fighters and lovers, but lets echoes of legends sound in their lives, as though those forces are as softly influential as songs on the radio.

As Theo, the dishevelled owner of a boxing booth in a 1962 roadshow, Gary Lydon has the gravity of an embattled king, fighting for obedience among shifty stall-operators and his prizefighters. His preening champ Dean (Anthony Morris) fights mainly for bragging rights, while the once-promising bruiser, Junior (Dermot Murphy), now vulnerable by an Achilles heel, fights irregularly. Amid the outsized egos and daily fracas, their weather-beaten coach, Peadar (Michael O’Hagan), simply fights for attention.

There is much confrontation in this steady production, to which Bui Bolg’s handsome set gives us, literally, ringside seats, but though the audience surrounds the playing space under the pleasing suggestion of a big top and Paul Keogan’s beautiful lights, the actual fighting happens offstage. This is how Roche likes it, who also directs the revival for new company Mosshouse, concentrating instead on battles of personality and history.

Nobody seems as spry and ferocious in the ring as Lydon’s Theo, who merely speaks there, but even he has met his match in Lesley McGuire’s salty Lily, his fearless squeeze. Her own challenger in this male kingdom is Theo’s long-lost daughter Emer (Pagan McGrath), implausibly reunited after 15 years, and little more than an excuse for Theo to recall love-triangles, endless journeys and mythology-tinged anecdotes of rescuing her mother from a maze-like home and a “bull-headed” brother, then later abandoning her. It is the trajectory of legendary Theseus, which is to say the behaviour of an archetypal a**hole.

Such references are discreet, but Roche can seem more interested in those underpinnings than the plot to explain character actions, and not without problems. While Lydon and McGuire bring substance to their roles, uneven casting means other characters won’t bear similar scrutiny.

Ultimately it is O’Hagan’s beaten Peadar, who recognises the hollowness of a world of has-beens and a possibility of escape; knowing that anything worth fighting for will be beyond the stuff of myth and outside these ropes.

Runs until April 2nd