The Local: Debs night, 1992, and a community’s hopes, dreams and difficulties are unfolding before us

The Local

Sheridans, Ennisnag, Co Kilkenny

★★★☆☆

In Medb Lambert, Clare Monnelly and Emma O’Grady’s ambitious community play The Local, the rural pub is a place of belonging and communion, where even outsiders are embraced and fit in. So says Sinéad Caffery (Gillian McCarthy), who acts as our guide into the past. A witness to the events we will see unfold, she talks across time to us, placing the world of the piece in context. Ireland has just elected its first woman president. Abortion, divorce and homosexuality are still illegal. Sinéad and her friends believed in a different kind of future.

The main thrust of the action is set on debs night in 1992: the community have gathered at the local to mark the graduation of their young to adulthood. In snatches of conversation overheard across the bar, we learn about the young people’s hopes and dreams, as well as their frustrations. Banger (James Quigley) is still reeling from the recent death of his father. Sensitive Wooly (Patrick McDonald) mourns a classmate’s death to suicide. Young Sinéad (Shannon O‘Doherty) may be pregnant. Síle (Joanne Bracken) has been stood up. In the local’s other nooks, an older generation gets to grips with grief, marital unhappiness and financial difficulties. But the night really belongs to the youth.

The Local is staged in the cabaret lounge of a working bar; the audience sit on sofas and bar stools. We are excitingly close to private scenes and privy to intimacies unfolding, but this forced naturalism is the least successful element of the production. At the show’s beginning, director Dónal Gallagher (with Janice De Bróithe) reassures us not to worry if we don’t catch everything, but there are long stretches in some of the seating areas where nothing much seems to happen at all. There are also several red herrings in the script: involved storylines outside the core narrative that drop off when the denouement becomes clear.

In fact The Local is at its best in its heightened, stylised moments, in which Cindy Cummings’s movement and Cormac O’Connor’s sound design capture the life and energy of youth in physical poses and dance. There they are leaping on to pool tables or sneaking through windows or line-dancing to Garth Brooks. In these moments they are connected beyond words and sharing something primal: the embodied promise of the future.