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Decorated theatre company Fishamble return with a provocative vision of an Ireland united—with Britain.
The Alternative, the latest play to come from the celebrated Irish Theatre company Fishamble, opens with its best gag. A Irish accent comes over the speakers, asking the audience to stand for their national anthem. Half of my auditorium obliged, only for the opening strains to God Save the Queen to play; being sung as Gaeilge. It’s a precursor for the sort of gleeful mischief that fuels the best parts of the script, written by Michael Patrick and Oisín Kearney, the ultimate winner of Fishamble’s “A Play for Ireland” competition. Set in a world where Irish Home Rule in the early 20th century was such a success that the idea caught on throughout the United Kingdom, it follows a heated contemporary election on Ireland’s future with the UK; a sort of Irexit for the rest of us. Will the country vote to Leave Britain, or to remain?
Our window into this world is a newsroom in BBC Ireland, where Karen Ardiff, a slick Dubliner Labour PM with the hawkish eyes of Hilary Clinton, debates the Irish First Minister, a wonderfully cute hoorish Arthur Riordan, on the eve of this Irexit election. The plot mainly follows the people running this production; the show’s producers, an older master of spin (Lorcan Cranitch) and his younger female mentee (Rachel O’Byrne) vie to control the spiralling programme. Rory Nolan is the stand-out of the cast as the channel’s egomaniac host, breaking out the charmingly ignorant Booterstown attitude he’s honed playing Ross O’Carroll-Kelly for how many years. (I pray everyone is able to hear his delivery of the line “she’s fond of the sneachta bán.”) All of them have their own selfish motivations for manipulating the debate’s results, and so, the chaos the debate causes begins.
The Alternative works best when it’s an alternate universe Thick of It-style political satire, all power-hungry public figures battling it out with sharp words and silver tongues. The dramatic weight of all this fun is pinned on the relationship between the show’s producer and his potentially schizophrenic daughter, Gráinne. Gráinne, played with the nervous energy of a corpse shocked with electricity by Maeve Fitzgerald, believes she can see alternate realities. While her abilities are obviously real (as made evident by the play’s very premise), the production seems uninterested in offering a real conversation around this misunderstood mental illness. A conflict between her and her father around her medication, which stops her from seeing alternate worlds, even seems in conflict with the play’s own messaging, muddying whatever meaning the play is interested in. Gráinne, as a character, feels like she’s mostly there to so the play can comment on it’s own alternative reality status. With such a transparent reason for her existence in the story, it’s hard to invest in her struggle. We know she’s right; but her story isn’t about her being right.
The most controversial, provocative, and frankly entertaining stroke of the script is the suggestion that a continued union with the UK would make for a better world. Sure, the people here still struggle with climate change and the woes of neo-liberal economics–but there’s no Brexit, higher employment, a healthier rural Ireland, and, oh yeah, World War 2 ended early. Why? Because Michael Collins fought in it, that’s why. Of course, the continued self-aware references, no matter how funny or wild, begin to drown the world of the text in exposition. This, along with the treatment of Gráinne’s plot, puts far too much metatextual weight on the world itself, and it begins to collapse in its clear understanding that this alternate world is not real. It’s hard to take the stakes of the election seriously when the show wants you to know so badly that this is just one of the, well, alternatives. However, even with this strained reality, the result is an extremely entertaining trip to an alternate world where, somehow, Michael Collins stopped the Hiroshima bombing. While the production may stumble in its ultimate drama, at least we can all enjoy that particular fantasy.
