The Sunshine Boys

Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork

TWO KINGS of comedy stand stricken by mutual despair, and it's hilarious. In this Proscenium Productions and Everyman Palace presentation of The Sunshine Boys, these are aged kings, but the point of Neil Simon's play of 1971 is that comedy may grow old but it never, never dies.

Neatly composed as an egg in its shell, the plot concerns an attempt to reunite a vaudeville pairing for a celebratory television programme. The problem is that Willie Clark, in his depreciating New York hotel room, and Al Lewis, in his daughter’s home in New Jersey, share a decade-long antipathy, which in Clark’s case has the force of energising antagonism.

Although ageing rather more gracefully than the script demands, Michael Twomey gives Clark a defiance of old age that would be gallant if it wasn’t so cussed. The demeanour of Dave Coon as Lewis is more resigned, a foil to his one-time partner’s rage against practically everything, yet together the couple still evince the almost organic relationship that created their popular absurdity of the past.

It’s great stuff, replete with gags you don’t see coming, accurately catching the wilful, liberating awkwardness of old age even while hinting at its discreet and desperate losses, physically restrained yet providing moments of comic resonance, such as an attempt to set a scene while moving like disabled dragoons preparing for the battle of Waterloo.

There are a few issues, notably the frantic gestures of Killian Collins as the nephew trying to organise a rerun, where director Pat Talbot seems to have relaxed his grip on the piece, but Olan Wrynn’s set and Paul Denby’s lighting combine efficiently, and a grateful audience relearns that language in which some words spit, those with a k are funny, and those without are not, and in which nurse, rehearse and girl all rhyme with oil.