Reviews
Enda Walsh’s darkly comic domestic farce, about a father and his two adult sons living in a decrepit council flat on London’s Walworth Road, is produced by Kilmeen Drama Group. It’s a bizarre play, and reveals Walsh’s febrile imagination. The father, Dinny (Christy O’Sullivan), is a bully who, every day, makes his sons put on a play about why the Cork family — minus the mother — ended up in London. For Dinny, London is hostile and, apart from Seán (Denis O’Sullivan) going to the supermarket for groceries every day, the family is under ‘house arrest’.
Saw this in the Everyman. Best play ever! #farcehttp://t.co/EFEI6XqhW6
— Lowliethefields 🇵🇸 (@lowliethefields) April 24, 2014
The set is extraordinary, comprising three rooms full of detritus, including monopoly money, a cardboard coffin and wigs. It’s claustrophobic, and the family seems oblivious to the squalor.
Blake (Dónal McSweeney) is the more aggressive of the two brothers. He dresses in women’s clothes and wigs to portray characters in the family’s former life. The three men become theatrical at the sound of a John McCormack record being played: it reminds them of home, which the father romanticises. Dinny reminisces about his family gathered around the television in their Cork home, cosily watching The Waltons. But this family is far from happy. Dinny has a dark past, which he does his utmost to erase by controlling his sons and feeding them his propaganda.
A trophy for the best performance is the prize for the daily dramas, which are acted out in between bickering and rituals around food. The men’s playacting is reminiscent of The Three Stooges. This surreal play, with its vicious underbelly, is Martin McDonaghesque. But Dinny isn’t menacing enough. As he combs his toupee, he is too comic a figure to really inspire fear.
When an outsider, a supermarket check-out girl, comes into the flat, the world of this family is turned upside down.
And what ensues is tragic meltdown.
Star Rating: 3/5
All five artists are recent graduates of Crawford College of Art and Design.
Helen O’Donovan is a painter whose palette is delicate and subtle, but more than up to what is required of it, to describe isolated everyday objects — a small box, a creased scrap of cloth — in terms that magnify their significance. Her titles are sometimes playful: a series of small paintings each describe a creased square of material, but revel in names such as Dragonfly, Crane and Frog.
Diarmaid O’Sullivan’s small paintings border on the photorealistic. In some, he also isolates objects — a series of screws in one, a ball of tinfoil in another — and renders them in fetishistic detail. The subject of Pop Art is a portion of bubble-wrap, each of whose bubbles appears to be burst. The larger paintings, such as Stack, and Canvas on Canvas, are looser — in these, O’Sullivan seems to be less concerned with detail and more with conveying his subjects’ bulk and weight.
Judy Fisher’s work in ceramics is largely inspired by the sea and the shore. There is a pleasantly sculptural element to much of her work: the wall-mounted Driftwood Disc is composed of a white stoneware object suspended on a rusted chain from a piece of weathered wood, while another untitled piece features a beachcombed metal bucket spilling black terracotta ‘pebbles’ onto a podium.
Siobhain Steele’s bone china pieces are more traditional in character: tall, elegant vessels arranged in rows, some marked with thin lines of colour, and others with broader ‘dripping’ patterns. There are also some small bowls. Steele’s achievement is to produce a range of pieces that are distinctively her own.
Benedicte Coleman’s loveably spooky sculptural work in the gallery vaults is constructed of used air filers from machines and vehicles. The pleated paper or fabric components sprout from the floor, the walls and the ceiling like the tentacles of otherworldly plants or creatures.
Coleman likens these tentacles to lungs, and it is not hard to imagine that they might indeed be breathing — certainly, they convey the sense of restlessness and threat.
Star Rating: 4/5
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