Connie review: Production at Theatre Royal revives memories of Limerick's forgotten Hollywood star
A scene from Connie, at the Theatre Royal, Limerick.
★★★★☆
Limerick’s long-derelict Theatre Royal is being reintroduced to audiences for this site-specific piece, dedicated to another largely forgotten part of Limerick’s history, Constance Smith, a 1950s Hollywood actress erroneously dubbed the “Dublin Dietrich" and, in the words of writers Joanne Ryan and Ann Blake, “the spit of Heddy Lamarr”.
We are introduced to Smith’s strikingly screen-friendly looks by a series of vintage movie posters as we wait in the cramped foyer of this old theatre and cinema; a programme is handed out by a cigarette girl, and we get vintage-looking “admit one” tickets, completing the sense of time and place.
Inside, it’s the old theatre’s uneven floors, empty balconies, and peeling paint. Pom Boyd’s Connie sweeps the floor of a London mental institution, whose patients are watching Eastenders. She’s fallen that far. Fittingly, for this time-capsule space, Ryan and Blake are about to give us a dream play. It’s Connie’s ghost in bardo, but as she says herself, she’d rather be in “the bar, though”.
Instead, with an ensemble of spirit guides playing the various roles of her mother, husband, Hollywood producers and directors, and so on, we revisit the key scenes in the life of a starlet. It proves a deft way to skip through the life of a once-notable local.
Smith’s rise and fall is told episodically, with film and live video elements projected onscreen lending a documentary feel at times. The score is provided by the Irish Chamber Orchestra, music that’s often nostalgically Irish, like a fittingly elegiac come-all-ye. The dirt-covered floor gives a suitable intimation of the grave, and paths through it are made or brushed over throughout the play.
We begin just before Smith first lands at Rank studios in London, escaping her Angela’s Ashes-worthy poverty to have her “potato bog” accent trained out of her. Then it’s off to Fox Studios in Hollywood, where the stark realities of the studio system prove not the making of Smith, but the breaking of her. “We own you,” the producer Darryl Zanuck tells her, as he arranges an abortion.
Smith turns to booze and pills to cope, and, all too soon, she’s fired for “challenging behaviour” as the gushing gossip rags have it. In reality, that amounts to her not assuming her place on the infamous “casting couch” of Zanuck, here a proto-Harvey Weinstein figure symbolic of a destructive patriarchal system.
complex staging doesn’t quite transcend the problem with episodic storytelling such as this, with its inevitable lack of dramatic tension or momentum. Nonetheless, Boyd as Smith is thoroughly believable. In a restaged RTÉ interview with her husband, the director Paul Rotha, Boyd’s Smith comes across like a strong-willed Edna O’Brien type. It seems they were both formidable women, though it was Smith’s tragedy that she fought a similar fight and lost.
As such, this play feels necessary, echoing its own premise in bringing a life out of the shadows. In the end, we circle back to Limerick and the Theatre Royal itself, which would have shown Smith’s movies. That, we are told, is the “final fragment” for her restless spirit. Yes, can be a bit corny. But really, it feels like the beginning of a rediscovery, a feminist reclamation of a life worth celebrating.
- Until November 2
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