Late October 2019
Every
now and again comes a play about which, when it's over, I'm asked by my
companion what I think. And my response is, “I don't know yet.” There can be
any number of reasons for this, but the most common one is this: I'm not
sure—in the metaphysical sense—why I was there; what I was there to see.
Irish dramatist Conor MacPherson has made a specialty of plays in which characters
either deliver a narrative directly to the audience (think: live audiobook) or
only interact in the context of present-day issuers to deliver narratives of things
offstage-past to each other…and his 2000 drama Dublin Carrol is among
the latter. It takes place in a back office of a Dublin funeral parlor that has
been reconverted into the living quarters for John (Jeffrey Bean), an older middle-aged fellow who has been given a job
and taken in by the parlor director, by way of helping John turn his life
around, his alcoholism having destroyed his family bonds. During the play,
which takes place over three scenes set right around Christmas eve, 1999, we
see John corral his boss's son Mark (Cillian
Hegarty) to be a kind of confessor to him, maybe a stand-in for his own
estranged son; and try to square things with his grown daughter Mary (Sarah Street), as her mother, the wife
he abandoned but never divorced, is now in hospital, dying of cancer. (Her name
is Carol, giving the title its double meaning.)
As usual for MacPherson, the
language is rich; and as usual for the Irish Rep, the production is a good one,
solidly acted under the direction of Ciarán
O'Reilly, on a believable and nicely detailed (and propped) set by Charlie Corcoran. And perhaps there's a
deeper humanist theme, but the ground is just too familiar for it to resonate
meaningfully. Thus, in the end, Dublin
Carol seems just another elegiac tone poem about the ravages of booze among
the Irish.
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