STEEL MAGNOLIAS by ROBERT HARLING at the LYRIC THEATRE, BELFAST on the 17th of June 2026

 

STEEL MAGNOLIAS by ROBERT HARLING at the LYRIC THEATRE, BELFAST on the 17th of June 2026

 

Steel Magnolias is a play that seems to be in the southern Gothic genre but it’s a traditional melodrama, more Meet me in St Louis than A Streetcar named Desire.  The conservative aesthetic means that the play has one set, the interior of Truvy’s hair salon, decked out in lipstick colours and conventional, period furniture (the play is set in the 1980s).   Like Meet me in St Louis the play marks itself out temporally in terms of traditional seasonal festivities like Xmas, the highpoints of the year when families tend to come together.

Steel Magnolias is a dialogue centric drama and plot is virtually irrelevant.  We are told in the first scene that the central character Shelby (played by Simone Collins) is diabetic and that she can’t have children.  By the second scene we learn that the doctor advised Shelby not to have children, should rather than must not.  Inevitably Shelby is with child and can’t resist the temptation to let the entire clientele of the hair salon know about it.  A gun is pulled out of a bag in the first scene which evokes Chekhov’s dictum ‘if you introduce a gun in the first act it must be fired by the third.’  What this broadly means is that an element once brought into the drama must be activated at some stage, but the gun is never fired in Steel Magnolias.

Despite the playful irrelevance of traditional elements like plot and eschewing Chekhov’s directive, the dialogue is full of amusingly quotable lines and humorous interludes that kept the audience laughing throughout.  As Truvy Jones (played by Orla Mullan) says (referring to southern men who adore the outdoor life) ‘shoot it, stuff it or marry it’.  The new girl in town is Annelle (played by Eimhear Jackson) who’s just started working in the salon.  It appears that her husband is on the run, she’s constantly questioned by the police about him.

Indeed, there are no male characters at all, though these were included in the film version they are merely alluded to here.  Truvy is the central character of the hair salon, but she doesn’t know everything.  Much of the dialogue could be described as word salad like Shelby’s declaration ‘my colours are blush and bashful’ which are apparently two shades of pink, but it underlines the trite, empty quality of much of the dialogue, the lack of plot.  Ultimately, Shelby’s demise after a failed kidney transplant doesn’t seem real either. 

Steel Magnolias is an excellent ensemble piece, brilliantly and beautifully represented by the Lyric theatre with outstanding performances, set design, sound design, based on a play which attempts, within definite limits, to capture a certain place and time in the USA in the 1980s.  America’s exuberance and confidence is centre stage here.

Paul Murphy, Lyric Theatre, June 2026

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paul Cezanne and Amadeo Modigliani

Image
Paul Cezanne: Painting People at the National Portrait Gallery and Amadeo Modigliani at the Tate Modern on the 26 th & 27 th of November 2017 Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) was born in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France but soon moved to Paris to be with his childhood friend, the writer Emile Zola.  Throughout his life he divided his time between Paris and Aix.  Cezanne’s father, Louis-Auguste Cezanne (1798-1886) had accrued a fortune firstly by selling hats and then as a banker.   He wanted his son to be a lawyer. However, Cezanne’s ambition was to be an artist.   His wish to be purposefully engaged in a creative life and to marry the woman he loved were all opposed by his father who also happens to be the subject of the first major painting in this exhibition.  Cezanne’s painting of his father, ‘The Artist’s Father reading L’Evenement’ (oil on canvas, 1866) demonstrates the dominant influence of Cezanne’s early life.  Louis-Auguste is ...
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

DENOUEMENT at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 23rd of October 2025

Image
  DENOUEMENT at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 23 rd of October 2025 Patrick O'Kane as Liam and Anna Healy as Edel This new play Denouement at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, was a pleasant surprise as the content diverged from the expected literary content, as expressed by the play’s title.   Ultimately, the play was not overly literary, but a better title would enhance things. Extraordinary elements are explained by the surround sound of a world war which is sometimes far and sometimes harrowingly close.   Television sets scattered around the set send warnings but also entertain with banal musicals.   Old technology like a typewriter is contrasted with jarringly new elements like mobile phones and the internet. Minor catastrophes intrude on Liam and Edel’s existence such as a crashed van and distant explosions.   Friends phone the couple to be admonished.   A constant metallic buzz surrounds the action, murmuring irritatingly, becoming a crescendo. ...
Read more