Of Mornington – Mill Theatre – Review by Paddy McG

Scalder Theatre Company in Billy Roche Premiere at Mill Theatre Dundrum

16th – 18th Nov 2016

With his newest play, “Of Mornington”, we are in familiar Billy Roche territory: the Wexford so vividly evoked in earlier works like “Cavalcaders” and “Poor Beast in the Rain”. But, as has often been remarked, like Friel’s Ballybeg, Roche’s world is an everywhere, transcending place and time with themes and characters that are universally recognisable. It is one where simple people confront complex emotional and practical dilemmas. What are they doing, where are they going, how will they get there? As Gayle Jordan’s Shauna remarks “you get the sense that they probably are all stuck there – even if they don’t think that”. And yet this is not quite true. Roche throws his characters a lifeline and the conclusion is not without optimism. They may, after all, break away. Maybe.

As the lights come up on the formica-topped counter and oilcloth-covered tables of The Kiosk, a café-cum-boarding house, a plaintive Brenda Lee sings “The sun comes up and brings the dawn/ As usual/ When I awake I’ll find you gone/ As usual”.  Roche’s unerring instinct for music opens a window onto the emotional landscape that will unfold on stage. Loss is a thematic seam running through the play – a mother’s loss of her child to the other parent, leaving her bereft; a snooker player’s loss of a successful career and the adulation that goes with it; a young man’s loss of hope and direction.

Gayle Jordan’s Shauna aspires to rise above those ranks with her hopes of a future in interior design. It is a brilliant performance. She bustles around the place with endless stage “business”, then rivets our attention with her stillness and calm.  When her naturally kind and bubbly personality cracks, her pent-up frustration and violence are electrifying. She throws away a line and restrains a gesture to perfect effect.

Jack Matthews is Mike, the young “nee’r-do-well” as Phil describes him, brought up “in care” in a Christian Brother-run reformatory or similar institution (probably Letterfrack). He longs for the snooker success that Phil once enjoyed. It is perfect casting, Matthews’s hangdog expression and defeated body language cancelling his effort to conceal his quiet desperation, his arms flopping like the broken wings of a bird. Living rough and dependent on the kindness of strangers, he captures the everyday experience of many young marginalised men today, in “the ranks of the left behind”, as a character says in another Roche play, while remaining a distinctly individual character.

Andy Doyle’s Phil, a once celebrity snooker player, who just might make a comeback, is the most complex character of the three.  By turns demanding and kind, he is capable of sneering casual cruelty, taunts Mike with what he may have experienced “in borstal” or viciously reminds Shauna of her motherless son. As the three egos joust for survival, nerves fray and the mood sways from barbs and begrudgery to tolerance and acceptance and indeed approval and support.

The play is superbly directed by Michael Dunbar, its rhythms observed, climaxes perfectly orchestrated, a skilfully charted journey through longing, desperation and delusion towards a redemption of sorts. In Roche’s “A Handful of Stars“, a character constantly bemoans that she’d “prefer to be somewhere else“. That sentiment echoes through the characters of “Of Mornington” but it is one you won’t hear from theatre goers leaving the Mill Theatre Dundrum where the production continues tonight and tomorrow night (November 17 and 18).

Cast –

Shauna – Gayle Jordan

Mike – Jack Mathews

Phil – Andy Doyle

Directed by Michael Dunbar