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Ulster American, a new play by David Ireland, ran at the Abbey Theatre from 9-20 April, and is directed by Gareth Nicholls. Ireland is best known for his play Cyprus Avenue, which won the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best New Play and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Drama, and toured successfully in the UK, Ireland and the USA. This dark comedy drama is performed by the well-known Traverse Theatre Company. Ireland seeks to layer slapstick comedy, extreme violence and witty humour. Also in the mix is, as director Nicholls puts it, an interrogation of “abuse of power, consent and male privilege”.
Jay Conway (Darrell D’Silva) is a successful, aging moviestar who has agreed to play the lead role in an original play by Belfast playwright Ruth Davenport (Lucianne McEvoy). Conway has come to London to meet with Davenport and with Leigh Carver (Robert Jack), the director of the play. Upon arrival at Carver’s flat, he is disappointed with what he finds: the play is from the perspective of an Ulster Defence Association veteran and Davenport is a working-class, “British” unionist.
After a rather laboured opening tête-à-tête between Conway and Carver, the play’s strongest period comes following Davenport’s arrival on the scene. She finds Carver’s sensibilities already starting to fray beneath to Conway’s manic energy and bizarre misogyny. McEvoy plays the much-needed straight-man with great ability, and larger-than-life D’Silva brings tremendous impetus to his role. Unfortunately, the play’s strongest section is also its simplest, as the characters exchange pretty standard gaffes about Northern Ireland: the Irish-American doesn’t know a thing about Ireland, the Englishman doesn’t care about the North, and the Irish playwright is a Belfast unionist who considers herself British—much to the dismay of the other characters. This is well-written, well-acted observational humour. It is not particularly incisive humour however, and one feels that the script is trying, unsuccessfully, to make a point as well as making the audience laugh.
Becky Minto’s set design channels IKEA and, indeed, the total lack of personal ornament, combined with Kate Bonney’s sterile, near-unchanging lighting design, not only speaks to Carver’s personality, it clears the stage for the play’s wordy dialogue and reinforces the sense that each character is under scrutiny. Sophie Ferguson’s costumes are similarly simple.
The violence seeks to shock—but it feels like the playwright is trying to shock you instead of this physicality growing in any way organically out of the events that have preceded it. This is typical of many of the play’s twists: they follow the logic of the piece’s satirical polemics rather than the “natural” way things would go, given the circumstances. The characters discuss Tarantino, so some Tarantino-esque violence erupts later on, et cetera. The artifice pokes through, no more so than in the rather flat characters, who are both two-dimensional and frustratingly inconsistent as they are frequently required to change tack in order to satisfy the script’s attempts to tie up all of its thematic and comedic threads. These threads are intriguing and often funny but they are unpolished. The play ultimately suffers for its own ambition as things feel crowbarred in, with the conceit that keeps them all in the same room towards the end feeling particularly forced.
This is a new play, and it feels unfinished—certainly unfinished rather than unpromising. It needs cuts, revisions and reconsideration: all touch-ups that such an ambitious, genre-bending comedy drama is bound to require.
