I'm in my seat at the Lyttleton and I'm thinking This is it. You're going to be the only person in the audience shrieking in laughter, and everyone's going to see you, and you're going to ruin their nice evening out at their Easter Uprising drama, and then afterwards someone named Padraig is going to beat the shit out of you. And it serves you right, you ghoul. A woman just nursed another woman back to health after childbirth--crossed religious lines to do so--and now she's dying from a gunshot--dying like A LOT--and you think it's funny. How would Velma Murray, your literal grandmother's actual maiden name, find you now? I just--just--held it together. But, friends, rest assured: there is nothing funnier in London right now than the last tennish minutes of this play, when the death machine really gets rolling.
Full confession: I have one of those vaguely Irish backgrounds--3/17 or somesuch--that many Canadians have. There was Irish memorabilia in the house where I grew up, if not much. I am not the ideal person to take things Irish seriously. And I was very tired, and quite loopy, when I saw this--no sleep and about three pots of coffee, all of which wore off right as this started.
I honestly couldn't tell you what happened in the first act--"oirish oirish oirish," it sounded like, for seventy hours. Someone threw a hat across the stage. The second act was in a bar, because Ireland. The third act had shooting, and a "choking the chicken" reference. I was trucking along, admiring the flat caps, seeing this as another dutiful box ticked: Irish, early twentieth century, note-how-this-author-addresses-themes-of-nationalism. Up until the deaths, this was an eminently forgettable night out at the theatre; for whole stretches of oirish I found myself staring at the clothes, thinking idly about John Lewis.
But THEN. Oh my then, the fourth act.
I have no recollection of the names of the two female characters, so I shall call them Fiona and Aoife, because those in my memory are Irish names. (Update: I have looked up the script, and one of them is actually named Fiona.) Fiona's husband has just died offstage, but not to worry, because she's gone this particular sort of mad that only people in drama go, where bleeding to death from a stillbirth causes you to make tea for your absent husband while shouting at people. And, I mean, Fiona really gets into it--she looks healthier, more vigorous, than she did during the first act, when she was healthy and everyone was alive. Congratulations to the actor for deciding to augment cask-strength Ophelia with a tic visible from the other side of the Thames. She looked like one of our Olympians, Bell Jarring for England.
Aoife, playing the shrewish Protestant, pulls Fiona away from the window; there are snipers about. Aoife, naturally, gets shot--with a cannon ball, given her bodily movements. "I'VE BEEN SHOT," she announces, which is helpful. This, reader, is where I start to lose it. This actor now sounds like Michael Palin doing a dying Irishwoman--doing several, really.
When I teach drama, I always tell my students, you know, in a theatre, you don't have to remain silent. You can talk or yell back or whatever--it's the magical coercive force of theatre that keeps you from doing so. And I am sitting there and wondering, What would actually happen if I shout "Somebody shoot her again." Like, seriously: what would literally happen? This is not helpful thinking. I hold it together, I really do. But by the time she's down on the stage gurgling, I think quite seriously three or four minutes later, I have my head in my lap and my teeth are nearly through my gum. I'm hoping--this in all seriousness--that Padraig thinks I am crying.
I do not think I have ever seen anything as ridiculous on a living stage. I cannot possibly recommend seeing this play just for this last act--but if you go, I promise, you'll never forget it.
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