Theatre review: Tommy Tiernan and Aaron Monaghan star in The Cave, by Kevin Barry
Tommy Tiernan and Aaron Monaghan in The Cave, by Kevin Barry, at the Abbey. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
★★★☆☆
Kevin Barry rarely writes a dull sentence. His novels are packed with startling phrases that have you reaching for the highlighter pen, or simply reading them again for the sheer pleasure of it.
And, in his new play for the Abbey, he puts into the mouths of the McCrea brothers, Archie (Tommy Tiernan) and Bopper (Aaron Monaghan), a stream of Irish kitsch and colourful reverie, mixed with the alienating absurdities of online life to create some startling contrasts and vivid, clashing images.
It’s Flann O’Brien meets Pat McCabe meets Enda Walsh meets Sam Beckett meets Tom Murphy meets Martin McDonagh, all played out on an outcrop of rock overlooking some benighted market town in Co Sligo. It’s fun to listen to, but across 13 scenes of desperation, there’s little momentum, the words failing to make the leap from page to stage.
The titular cave is at the centre of our hilltop setting. It’s given a blasted, post-apocalyptic look in Sinead Diskin’s design, stretched like a huge, crumpled piece of paper behind Archie and Bopper.
But the cultural references, and complaints about rural broadband rollout from our internet-obsessed pair, make it clear this is the present day.
The cave is where the McCreas, a pair of miscreant eejits, have been sheltering, in the hope they can get their wreck of a van (parked stage right in a state of disassembled disrepair) going again.
The brothers are soon joined by Judith Roddy as their sister, Helen, a local garda, who gives details to explain the brothers’ present dire situation.
By contrast, they are content to fill the void in their lives with past obsessions, memories of rain-swept peculiarly Irish family misery, in rehearsing eulogies for each other, or obsessing about a Mexican celeb whose Instagram portrays her perfect life with Con Costello.
He’s some kind of Sligo Chris O’Dowd, it seems, who’s gotten away and made good, and is thus hated. If it's impossible not to think of when confronted by a pair of verbose tramps in a barren landscape, Tiernan’s Archie is like an innocent, questioning Estragon. Monaghan’s Bopper, meanwhile, has the authority of Vladimir within this dynamic. But the comparison ends there in his raw, irascible, pained portrayal.
Caitriona McLaughlin directs us through the verbiage, leaning into the laughs but accentuating moments of poignancy too. It ends as darkly as you’d expect, after putting off the inevitable for too long. An epilogue from Helen adds a sense of what more structure and concision might have helped achieve.
- Until July 18. At Town Hall, Galway, July 22-26.
