Theatre review: The Quiet Man returns to original tale of rural life
Art Campion and Margaret McAuliffe in The Quiet Man at the Civic Theatre. Picture: Paul McCarthy
- The Quiet Man
- Civic Theatre
- Dublin Theatre Festival
- ★★★☆☆
is of course best known as perhaps Hollywood’s finest piece of cod-Irish bluster and blarney. John Ford’s Oscar-winning film with Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne is based on a story by Maurice Walsh that, presumably, precious few people read any more.
But it’s back to this that John Breen and Mikel Murfi return in their adaptation, and it’s to the pair’s credit that they make it seem like they’ve unearthed an original stage play, rather than adapted a story. The piece has echoes of, say, a midcentury Lennox Robinson entertainment, or John B Keane’s the dramatic arc of a Restoration marriage-plot comedy, and those Mikel Murfi hallmarks of physical comedy, along with, in Sabine Dargent’s design, an ingenious ability to summon entire worlds with just a few found-object pieces of set.
Thus, a pair of window frames serve perfectly well for a car, a hearth can be wheeled in as if on a little trolley, some chairs can become a flock of unruly sheep, and two sticks of furniture is all you need for a ploughing contest. Hurleys, cows, and fists do fly too, in a cartoonish world that gently sends up stage Irishry, without being afraid to embody it too.
Yes: this is about land, and dowries, and matchmaking, and drinking, and farming, and fighting. But Breen, best known for digs a little deeper too. It’s also about the Civil War, and how a society might try to move on from that. Is it better to right old wrongs, or leave the cards where they fell?
There are quieter moments amid the dust-ups, drinkin’ and donnybrooks, in which Margaret McAuliffe’s flame-haired Mary Kate Danagher and her suitor, Paddy Bán Enright, get to explore their courtship, and voice their divisive, problematic, and (of course) ultimately surmountable differences when it comes to ideas of honour, duty, and what other people think of you. In a place like this, Mary Kate reminds the returned emigre Paddy Bán, that last one is all that matters.
This is all very familiar terrain, on occasion tediously so. The double directing credits for Murfi and Breen lead to a schizophrenic production whose two sides never quite cohere.
But Murfi and Breen do succeed in reframing the misogyny of the Hollywood representation at least, even if Art Campion as Paddy Bán still supplies the necessary film-star good looks. Amongst a strong cast, Dan Gordon is a lively and wily embodiment of the matchmaker and general local fixer Micilin Og, while Peter Gowen is a redoubtable and irascible Will Danagher.
- Until October 12
