BURNT OUT at the LYRIC THEATRE, BELFAST on the 11th, October 2023 written by Gary Mitchell, directed by Jimmy Fay

 

BURNT OUT at the LYRIC THEATRE, BELFAST on the 11th, October 2023 written by Gary Mitchell, directed by Jimmy Fay

Caolan Byrne, Kerri Quinn and Terence Keeley in Burnt Out at the Lyric Theatre
 

Michael and Cheryl are a couple living somewhere in Belfast.  They are clearly aspirational, Michael is aiming to be Vice Principal of the primary school he works at, Cheryl has built up a hair dressing salon.  They live right across the road from the local 12th night bonfire which has become a source of conflict.  Someone has complained to the police about the bonfire, but no one wants to admit to it because of the likelihood of retaliation.  The police, in the person of P.C. McGoldrick (played by Caroline Curran), have called to see Michael and Cheryl because they have been complained about.  It appears that their large German shepherd dog has been defecating on the area near the bonfire.  The police are depicted as an intrusive power possessed of some largely undisclosed yet suspected hidden agenda.

Caolan Byrne in Burnt Out


The play deals largely in a predictable Belfast situation and perhaps that predictability is a deficit, one which is completely familiar to anyone living in the city.  Territory is a source of claim and counter claim, and everyone endures an awful siege mentality.  The scene, completely static, is Michael and Cheryl’s front room, brightly lit by stage lights and lit again by lamps.  There’s the usual big crystal TV set, a room painted in subdued vanilla hues, everything bold and cheesy.  Initially we look through a window into their home and then the façade is lifted away to signify perhaps the erasure of the fourth wall, the division between audience and play.  The soundtrack is a medley of songs both very recent and rather old, but the atmosphere is more Hollywood than Belfast.  The effects aim to create a cinematic rather than a theatrical experience except that we are still in the theatre.

Kerri Quinn in Burnt Out


Michael’s brother Donny pops round for a word with the couple.  Donny is bigger, less well educated but more streetwise and aggressive than Michael.  He’s dating Leslie who also happens to be the liaison officer for the bonfire committee.  They want to negotiate a compromise between the local hoodlums and Michael and Cheryl which involves paying money, something which Cheryl resists.  Consequently, her hairdressing salon is vandalised, her dog is poisoned, and Michael’s cat is thrown onto the bonfire.  Michael and Cheryl refuse to pay the money, but neither will they pay the money to move to a better area.  They are stuck with a narrowing range of options.

Kerri Quinn, Caolan Byrne and Terence Keeley in Burnt Out


In this harrowing black comedy, Cheryl (played by Kerri Quinn) is the emotional centre of the action and her relationship with her brother-in-law Donny, the dramatic fulcrum of this action.  Donny sees a man’s role in society as being dominant, physically superior.  Women, concomitantly, are weak and inferior.  Michael, though intellectually superior to Donny, is incapable of standing up to him effectively, paying him to stay away is the best he can do.  The performances are committed but Caolan Byrne’s performance as Donny is outstanding.  He represents the old-fashioned patriarchal values that Michael (played effectively by Terence Keeley) and Cheryl are unconsciously opposing.  Donny’s girlfriend Lesley, played by Shannon McNeice, supports Donny but she also fears and resents his physicality and eventually deserts him.  The performances are intense and the light comic exchanges appear to heighten the sense of gathering tensions.

Shannen McNeice and Caroline Curran in Burnt Out


Michael’s car is destroyed when the tyres are accidentally blown up by the heat of the bonfire.  The first part of the play ends literally with a bang.  The play’s second half effectively sustains and heightens the tensions between the characters.  The conflict begins to resemble the story of Cain and Abel rather than the Troubles melodrama that it sets out to be, but it is Cheryl who has the final say.

Terence Keeley and Shannen McNeice in Burnt Out


Burnt Out is a play fizzing with tension and laughs too and is highly recommended.

Paul Murphy, Lyric Theatre, October 2023

https://www.thebelfastengine.co.uk/

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