Theatre Review: After Sarah Miles

Venue: Mick Lally Theatre, Galway

Boasting a tour-de-force performance from Don Wycherley, After Sarah Miles is a charming and absorbing play that maps out one man’s life as a constellation of wrong turns and second chances. That man is Dingle fisherman Bobeen, a warm soul who guides us through his life, from his impressionable boyhood encounter with US actor Robert Mitchum, to his years of drinking and disappointment.

Though this is a fine yarn, writer Michael Hilliard Mulcahy’s greatest strength is his ear for dialect. There is lovely language here. Bobeen recalls David Lean, the director of Ryan’s Daughter, which was filmed in Dingle, asking him to throw potatoes at a man for one scene in the movie. The ever more frustrated Lean ends up “boiling like a spud himself”. Wycherley laps up these splendid turns of phrase, charismatically etching out his character from the very rhythm of his words.