The Gap Year by Claire McMahon at the Lyric Theatre on the 7th September, 2022

 

THE GAP YEAR by Claire McMahon at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast

Directed by Benjamin Gould

Set director – Stuart Marshall

Lighting Designer – James C McFetridge

Sound Designer – Garth McConaghie

The Gap Year is a crowd-pleasing romp conceived by Claire McMahon and presented by the Lyric Theatre, Belfast.  It begins, somewhat dis-ingeniously, at the beginning with a wake, and goes off like an arrow shot in a straight line ahead or a lone crow flying across a horizon.

Three women go off on a year out facing crises of ageing such as bereavement, Alzheimers, and separation.  Unlike Shirley Valentine, they don’t decide to travel to sun drenched beaches, warm seas and pina coladas but to a danker, wetter place which is all too familiar, namely their own country, the counties of Ireland, setting foot in every Irish county on the way.

The set design is efficient and effective, a landscape abstract serves as a backdrop, a hillside that could be anywhere in Ireland (since it all looks the same anyway).  There are fast, effective scene changes, economy of effects and props.  The lighting design is constructed around contrasts of interiors and exteriors that somehow coincide and then collide.  Both diegetic and non-diegetic sound is used to suggest the rapidly changing landscapes and cityscapes that the characters inhabit.

Profound themes are touched upon and then abandoned.  Kate (played effectively by Carol Moore), whose husband ‘dropped dead in the bread isle of Lidl’ meets a nun and discusses the nature of death and remorse.  Kate views God as cruel, leaving her husband to die alone on a cold, concrete surface, the nun views God rather as being silent.  Her vocation has enabled her to cope with her own trauma, her entire family had been killed in a meaningless car accident.  Kate views her as having sacrificed her personal life for devotion to a remote deity.

This theme never re-surfaces and, consequently, the drama has a narrow, episodic feel that rarely feels unified and complete.  The play might have been more successful on radio than on the stage.

Kate’s travelling companions, Roisin, and Oonagh, also face the cruelties of age, Alzheimers, separation, abandonment, ageism.  The characters linger on the past because there is nothing else.  Upbeat songs like ‘Downtown’ and a filmed interlude in a nightclub cannot stave off the inevitability of dissolution, the drift towards death and destruction or life in ‘a semi-detached on the Shore Road’.  Oonagh, however, manages to discover a new love, and Roisin’s husband returns to her when she discovers that she has Alzheimers.

There is, then, some hope.  The play ends in county Meath at the oldest site in Ireland, the Newgrange monument that is more than 5,000 years old.  A more successful play might have been sustained by developing the profound themes that are merely touched upon rather than constantly pandering to populism.  The things that please crowds don’t always make for good theatre.

Paul Murphy, Belfast, September 2022

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maharajah: The Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington

Maharajah: The Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington  This is an unbelievably impressive exhibition maintaining the usual high standard of events at the V & A. India was overwhelmed by stronger neighbours, then by Western Imperialists, seeking a colony that fitted with their nostrums, that might be strategically advantageous. Even today the current war is based really on Indo-Pakistan relations representing the Islamification of east and west India (now Pakistan and Bangladesh) first brought about by the Moghuls. The Moghuls, a nation that originated in Persia but actual descendants of the Timurids, hence their homeland Moghulistan (Mongolistan). The Moghuls were essentially militaristic, even more militaristic than the native Rajputs, who seemed to have lived by a kind of Zealot ethic, preferring suicide to dishonour. They were clearly a very powerful presence until their influence waned and the British came to establish the Raj, but the words we have of 'Indian'
Read more

THE PAINTED VEIL and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

The Painted Veil (2006), dir John Curran, starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Diana Rigg and Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), dir Mike Newell, starring Javier Bardem The Painted Veil , adapted from a Somerset Maugham novel, is a moving tale of a love affair played out before the backdrop of a cholera epidemic in China sometime in the early 20th century. The film depicts the horrors of cholera, the beauty of the Chinese landscape, the trials and tribulations of Walter and Kitty Fane’s relationship. Love in the Time of Cholera , (another adaptation from the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, adapted by Ronald Harwood) shares with The Painted Veil the theme of Europeans in a non-European locale, coping, or failing to cope, with cholera. In The Painted Veil , Walter Fane (played by Edward Norton, an American actor with a high art reputation), a British medical official sent to a remote Chinese Province to help control a cholera epidemic is estranged from his wife Kitty, who has be
Read more

Notes on the films of Sam Peckinpah

Last evening I watched Pat Garret and Billy the Kid by Sam Peckinpah.   I haven't seen such a film for a very long time, dull melancholic edge tainted with sadness and elegiac to the core.   I noticed that there were many production problems, as many as 6 editors, and Peckinpah disowned the film eventually.   I think the problem with the film, however, is Bob Dylan, not the editing.   He clearly can't act, his presence is irritating and, apart from the well-known song, hardly quoted in the film, the soundtrack is underwhelming.   There were so many laudable cameos otherwise, Slim Pickens, Jason Robards, Harry Dean Stanton, and Kris Kristoffersen who pulls it off somehow as Billy but who knows what his acting is really like.   I really wished someone would shoot Dylan just to get him out of the film, instead Pickens is shot and various other worthwhile character actors. The still centre of the film is James Coburn in this, his second film for Peckinpah.   After he shoots Billy
Read more