The Stage

Greta Garbo Came to Donegal

Published Tuesday 12 January 2010 at 11:20 by Heather Neill

Frank McGuinness’ engaging new play is set in 1967, between the Summer of Love and the Troubles, between controlled loneliness and expressive family bickering. It is almost in the tradition of the outsider who alters the status quo, but the volatile Hennessys are already capable of explosive change - clever daughter Colette’s exam results precipitate an exchange of cruel truths between her unfulfilled parents and her unmarried aunt as she determines to go to Dublin to study medicine.

Michelle Fairley (Paulie Hennessy) in Greta Garbo Came To Donegal at the Tricycle Theatre Photo: Tristram Kenton

The family are servants in a grand country house, once their home, now owned by successful artist Matthew Dover. The outsider is none other than the 62-year-old Swedish screen goddess, a friend and admirer of the artist. Caroline Lagerfelt does her best to make this strange, elegant creature human, but (and the quotations in the programme suggest this is accurate) she is mainly a collection of self-absorbed pronouncements dressed up as aphorisms. McGuinness is a humane writer, however, and he provides her with an unlikely attraction, which betokens recognition of loneliness as much as love, to old maid Paulie, finely played by Michelle Fairley.

Dover’s handsome, violent lover, recalling Francis Bacon’s relationships, is not perhaps menacing enough in Tom McKay’s performance. Angeline Ball as Colette’s annoying mother Sylvia finds her vulnerability. Robert Jones’ inside-outside set is delightful and Nicolas Kent’s direction is in tune with the play’s moods.

The symbolism of the cruel, beautiful peacock, weirdly glamorous in this rustic outpost, is rather too emphatic. Bird symbolism is not the only echo of Chekhov - longing for elsewhere, a botched shooting, a world about to be lost are all there too.

McGuinness ultimately makes a case for love, however inadequate, even when it is vehemently denied.