Theatre Review: The Night Alive at Gaiety Theatre

4/5

Tommy (Adrian Dunbar) is one of life’s also-rans, a middle-aged man estranged from his wife and children, who rents a tatty backroom flat in the house of his uncle Maurice (Frank Grimes). A decent skin, Tommy makes a crust as a kind of Dublin Del Boy, doing odd jobs with his dim-witted accomplice, Doc (Laurence Kinlan).

However, when Tommy’s decides to give shelter to Aimee (Kate Stanley Brennan), a prostitute who has just been violently assaulted by her boyfriend, the ramshackle elements of his life finally close in on him.

It’s telling that the characters in Conor McPherson’s play are more interesting than the story he engineers for them.

That’s due in part to the roundly excellent performances of the cast and due also to McPherson’s gift for creating naturalistic characters. Even if the latter are sometimes a little ‘stock’, McPherson etches out whole acres of humanity in them.

Yet even here the writing can stumble, as when McPherson overcooks Maurice and Aimee with psychological reveals that needlessly ‘explain’ their inner torments.

The Night Alive is at its strongest when engaged in moments of pure theatre, as when Ian Lloyd Anderson communicates his character’s monstrous rage and isolation through nothing other than an innocuous children’s toy.

Similarly, McPherson’s wry dialogue is often very poignant, as when Maurice warns Tommy that people don’t get endless ‘goes’ at life – only two or three ‘goes’ at the most.

This issue of how many lives one gets is in fact core to a subtle narrative shift late in the play that finds McPherson vaguely courting the supernatural.

This shift doesn’t transform a middling narrative but it does add some welcome intrigue and perhaps exposes our desires for a happy ending too.

Ultimately, The Night Alive works in spite of itself, the performances so charismatic, the dialogue so spiked with flair and the show so steeped in theatricality, that you can turn a blind eye to its less satisfying elements.

Until tomorrow, then Lyric Theatre, Belfast October 6-31