Sunday Morning Coming Down

Cork Arts Theatre

FOR HIS DEBUT as director with his Truman Town Theatre Company, writer Mick Donnellan describes a small-town home in which the only refuge from a drunken father is the pub.

Apart from the credibly gallant mother, played by Teresa Leahy, everyone in Sunday Morning Coming Downis coming down, but not coming to terms. The realism of this portrait of Irish domesticity is grossly emphasised by male conversation in which every adjective is casually obscene, as is every metaphor – and almost every noun.

Donnellan inflects much of the dialogue with, again, a casual misogyny, a kind of imaginative brutalism infecting speech but hopefully not action, despite apparently acceptable animal cruelty. A son has returned briefly from his bolt-hole in Italy; his brother intends to remain working at the local meat-factory; his mother is committed to standing by her man, though the man, the father of the family, is more pariah than patriarch. An everyday story, in other words, given life and significance by committed performances which excavate substance from a skin-deep script.

As a writer, Donnellan has considerable potential but, on this evidence, needs to bind his dramatic intentions more securely to stagecraft. Also, he poses questions of likelihood which hang about as distractions from possibilities that should provide tension and pace. Why, for example, would a house riven by alcoholism be so well stocked with beer, wine and whiskey? Doubts are also encouraged by directorial contradictions: a character sleeps through a brawl; both women wear shoes which announce their arrival before they appear; a cupboard is bare. This may be why cutlery is energetically applied to empty plates, but even under erratic lighting, alcohol remains visible and potent.