The Matchmaker review: loneliness and clerical domination wrapped in a farce

Rating: 3/5

When Phyllis Ryan adapted John B Keane's Letters of a Matchmaker for the stage, she didn't do its author any favours. Apart from at the box office, that is, where the tickets still spin out to fill the Irish appetite for inadequate euphemisms.

Dicky Mick Dicky O’Connor writes to his sister in America about the people who write to him, ready to pay for his assistance in finding a man whose tackle is in fair working order or a woman who doesn’t have to be dosed with poitín in her bedtime milk before disappearing under a quilt shuddering with ecstasy.

To this gallery of wistful grotesques is added a pseudo-aristocrat requesting a sweet boy. Hidden beneath the ribald farce of Keane’s comic bluster of 1975 are two topics that have distinguished his career: the yearning for loving companionship and the abusive power of the Catholic Church. These late-comers emerge in a diversion into third-person narrative and direct dialogue, an unapologetic contrast to the letters that push what serves as a plot to its delayed conclusion.

Of course, Keane was more than a purveyor of a community leering as if from a Flemish painting; how to counter the catalogue of letters from a rural population with names as long as their pre-postcode addresses was a challenge Ryan met by shaking the script upside-down and seeing what might fall out – and out with a thud fall rustic loneliness, clerical domination and a finale canopied by a constellation of goodwill.

As directed by Michael Scott, Mary McEvoy and Jon Kenny provide everything Keane could have desired in their commitment to the writing. Their skill in holding the tenuous thread between the lurid demands for copulation, with every syllable a spit, and the underlying theme of achieved happiness, is the play's satisfaction, for these are remarkably sustained and forgiving performances. Until August 14th