Big Ole Piece of Cake

Civic Theatre, Dublin

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, wrote Tolstoy, but for the dispossessed members of two broken homes in Seán McLoughlin’s new play for Fishamble, unhappiness is all they have in common.

The follow-up to 2007's Noah and the Tower Flowerbrings two brothers, forced from their home in unspecified circumstances, into the living room of a lonely teacher abandoned by his wife and daughters. Even this temporary union, which flares with fondness and fractiousness, will crumble beneath the sins of the past.

Character is destiny, which might sum up McLoughlin’s approach to plotting.

Less interested in why Mark Lambert’s gregarious Clarence would invite anyone as hyper-kinetic as Ian-Lloyd Anderson’s artless Colin or as patently shifty as Joe Hanley’s elder brother Ray to his home, McLoughlin busies himself in the steady reveal of character traits, while his play shares Clarence’s need for conversation.

And boy do they talk.

Lubricated by whisky and cider, their speech meanders through a surfeit of detail – Colin’s fascination with Oakland gangstas and the colour yellow, the ex-history teacher Clarence’s calming recitation of the Irish-Bruce wars, Ray’s protective attachment to his hat. Together with a stream of generously described off-stage characters, it provides numerous intriguing, inchoate elements that never quite solidify into a narrative.

“That a symbol for somethin’?” Hanley’s enjoyably suspicious Ray asks of a painting and even Anderson’s endearingly gormless Colin suspects as much when a coveted Austrian antique clock chimes with Chekhovian significance.

It’s a teasing question: what is important in this patter? Director Jim Culleton and designer Sinéad O’Hanlon seem undecided, working with sedentary performances and a numbingly realistic set, as though the portrait of men in decline is enough.

The loose father-son dynamic is cosseted in drifting contemporary references to Barack Obama, “businessmen and bankers”, economic collapse, but any bracing menace that might seep into the ambiguity of the situation is avoided (Colin and Ray consider stealing a caravan without much conviction) and though we hear harrowing details about Clarence’s abusive alcoholism, we barely see it. The stage is subjugated to speech, less a place to show than tell.

That has unfortunate consequences for the climax, which blurts out backstory in a frenzy, creates calamity in an instant, then dawdles over the aftermath to stress its significance. At a crisis point, brotherly bonds are suddenly renewed. It may be intended as character transformation, but without the sturdy support of plot, it comes off as inconsistency.

A talent for characterisation and amiably demotic speech is one thing, but like fathoming the ties of family, playmaking isn’t a piece of cake.

Continues until November 6, then transfers to Project Arts Centre, November 8-20, and Draíocht, Blanchardstown, November 23-27