The Whiteheaded Boy review: Cork playwright's classic gets an impressive makeover at the Abbey
Peter McGann, Anna Healy and Fionnuala Gygax in The Whiteheaded Boy, at the Abbey. Picture: Patricio Cassinoni
★★★★☆
Lennox Robinson occupies at once a central and uncertain place in the history of Irish theatre. He set his sights on the Abbey Theatre early after seeing, in 1907, a touring production in the Opera House of his native Cork. “The world of the theatre … opened to my eyes,” he wrote, and it was the start of a long career at the National Theatre as a playwright and administrator.
Robinson is best remembered for a handful of well-crafted farces. These need to be handled with, if not care, then discretion by any director. In the case of this revival of The Whiteheaded Boy, we have Annie Ryan, whom you could implicitly trust with this sort of thing.
As with the last Robinson revival at the Abbey, there’s plenty of room for farce, big gestures, and cartoonish characterisation – certainly within Ryan’s wheelhouse. And, where that production missed the mark with laboured gags, quirks, and panto shoutiness, hers hits it consistently, while rarely being anything but shouty and madcap.
Ryan has cannily set the action in the 1980s, somewhere in Co Cork, or Limerick. Robinson’s world was that of the old zero-sum Ireland, where everyone was looking for a “position” or a windfall, or to run the post office, or whatever. That, or the emigrant boat. Not too dissimilar to the 1980s, then.
A soundtrack featuring the likes of the Boomtown Rats, Blondie, and Joy Division adds to the sense of time and place, while Sinead Cuthbert’s patterned costumes are as loud as the action. Maree Kearns’s set is a sea of lino and kitsch, down to the tiled fireplace, replete with two-bar electric fire. The space is perhaps a little too vast, even for this crowded, kinetic action, and might have benefited from losing a few feet on either side.
Things get rolling when the titular boy, Denis Geoghegan, returns from Trinity College. The apple of his mother’s eye, he’s in fact a wastrel. A feckless gambler who, once again, has failed his exams. Dutiful brother George has had enough. And, despite Denis’s long engagement to the daughter of Mr Duffy, the local big shot, he’s to be shipped off to Canada.
What follows is delightful nonsense, as competing family members plot and rage, and Mr Duffy sticks his oar in.
The cast are a delight. Clare Barrett was born to make Mrs Geoghegan into the bonkers, biased, mollycoddling mother she is here. While Anna Healy as Aunt Ellen, and Andrew Bennett as Duffy, her former suitor, are hilarious.
They also provide, it must be said, a quite unexpected outlet for Annie Ryan’s professional skills as an intimacy coordinator. We’ve hardly seen intimacy like it on the Abbey stage, or any for that matter. Genevieve Hulme-Beaman as the spinster sister Kate is unrecognisable, also doubling as a capering, hard-drinking narrator.
Teddy Moore’s Denis is played camp as can be, and he certainly has a flamboyant way with a dressing gown, when not looking like a long lost member of Dexys Midnight Runners.
At the end of what Ryan has made into a midsummer night’s sex comedy, things work out – for a few. But amid a refrain of “some day”, the Geoghan siblings’ futures are mostly put on hold. “You’ll go – some day … You’ll marry – some day”: it’s a refrain all too familiar again for a generation of young Irish people.
Perhaps that’s why we go back to the banging soundtrack to finish, via Talking Heads. Burning Down the House? Yes. But bringing it down too, to a rapturous opening-night reception.
- Until July 26
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