9 July 2005: Jones, Stones in his Pockets
New Century Theatre, Theatre 14 at Smith College. Directed by Ed Golden
Invariably, Ed Golden produces fine, clear results as a director. Here, he had two first-rate actors to guide through this demanding and satisfying play: Sam Rush, producing director of NCT, and Buzz Roddy, a veteran actor. They are very well cast and superbly well matched.
I saw this play first at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, London (the most Irish of London districts). It was a transfer from Dublin (the Gate or the Abbey, I don’t remember which). It made a big hit there and transferred to the Duke of York’s (as I remember), in the West End, where it played for months. It was a fine choice for NCT: a deeply engaging play for two actors to enact a whole raft of parts, to much good comic effect, while at the same time a sobering leitmotif of despair over the drabness and life-denying quality of Irish life persists through to the end. I wrote about this play when I first saw it, and so I won’t go into much detail here about the work itself. But it’s important to note the extent to which this is truly an actor’s play — actors’, I should say, because it depends for its success on the abilities of two performers to put on masks of a dozen or so characters each and to do so in rapid succession. In this production the only property is a coat rack, downstage left, with a few shirts, hats, and other items of clothing hanging on it, and two pairs of shoes at its base, one pair for each actor. Oh, and two plain, wooden chairs, painted black, carried on by the actors at the start. Upstage, projected on a screen, is a full-scale image of a western Ireland scene, reminiscent of the ring of Kerry (there is a reference to the Blaskett Islands in the text of the play). The Dingle peninsula, we might think. Later images are of increasing numbers of cows — a reference to the school-boy’s essay written by the young man who later fills his pockets with stones to weigh him down as he walks into the water to drown himself, having suffered more humiliation than he can bear at the hands of the Hollywood actress who is the star of the film company on location in Kerry and hiring local people as extras — locals who are beset by dreams of stardom that might take them forever out of the cruel poverty and pointless existence ignored by the producers that hire them.
As I was saying, the two actors transform themselves into all the parts necessary to create the ensemble, working from their base characterizations of Jake Quinn (Sam Rush) and Charlie Conlon (Buzz Roddy). The creations were perilously close to caricature, because of the exigency of needing to create a clear, unambiguous profile that in some cases has to be put on and then doffed again in a matter of seconds. This is done by a turn in place, a movement of the arm or turn of the head; occasionally a retreat to the coat rack occurs for a swift change of shirt or shoes; more frequently, a rounding of o