REVIEW: Savoy (The Peacock, Dublin)

Signs are that playwright, Eugene O’Brien intends making his little bit of Ireland – Edenderry – as much of a creative resort as Brian Friel made of his imaginary Ballybeg. O’Brien’s last play, the slow-burning two-hander of marital implosion, Eden, was set there, and the characters in his latest fetch up in the same midlands small town.

Also present and correct this time around are all the mean-spiritedness and ancient wounds of the worst of claustrophobic small town life, as well as a powerful sense that life is elsewhere, just beyond the dual carriageway, where the early fruits of new prosperity are being harvested.

But back in Eden – in an echo of Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show – the local cinema is about to close. It cannot, it seems, survive until the new meat factory opens, with its promise of eager, moneyed punters.

The final reels of film – Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, a closing feature bemoaned by almost everyone – have been packed away into their metal boxes and a wake is underway. Officiating are Andy (Eamon Morrissey) the desiccated dreamer, collector of ticket stubs and wielder of the ceremonial torch in the darkness and David (Fergal McElherron) the son of the owner, now a small time TV soap actor whose star is in the decline.

Others drop by now and then to take a drink, or drop of metaphorical bombshell, most notably John Olohan, as Pax, the chipper realist who has just lost his job as projectionist. Essentially, however, Morrissey and McElherron are the focus of this evening of bitter recriminations and devastating revelations.

That O’Brien’s play moves is quite such a predictable ark is troubling, particularly as there is not nearly enough polish to the writing or to the production here to get away a plodding plot.

There is something deeply distracting about the way space is used on the Peacock stage. Blaithin Sheerin's stage design is neat enough – particularly a box office and red carpeted foyer in the first half -- but the actors seem to flail around it. People keep darting across the stage to address someone only to run straight back to their original marks and wait for their next call to action like overworked waiters.

As this frenetic action is pretty much out of register with the story (which unfolds with great leisure) the movement is confusing at best, and disruptive at worst.

Eamon Morrissey’s came late into the production late (after illness forced Jim Norton out), which goes some way towards explaining a sense that he never really inhabits his role. McElherron, however, has no such umbrella. The scenes between these two, which are the heart of the play, are hard, brittle and, consequently, weary exactly when they should most wrest attention. Like too much of this juddering production, the relationship feels oddly incomplete, unfinished even.