The Stage

The Night Season

Published Friday 6 August 2004 at 15:15 by Jason Best

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s second play happily mixes the lyrical and the profane. Her characters, three generations of a disputatious Irish family in County Sligo, slip easily from snatches of poetry to copious swearing. They are also effortlessly amusing.

You wouldn’t think, though, that this household had much to laugh about. Sporadically dotty grandmother Lily (Annette Crosbie) has been given a few months to live, feckless dad Patrick (David Bradley) is a champion boozer, while his three daughters, Judith (Susan Lynch), Rose (Justine Mitchell) and Maud (Sarah-Jane Drummey) haven’t got over their mother’s desertion of the family 15 years earlier.

Yet Lenkiewicz’s characters constantly surprise. Just when you think everyone on stage is irredeemably self-absorbed, they reach out tenderly to someone else. Lily takes a shine to the handsome new lodger, visiting actor John (John Light), who is playing the poet Yeats in a film, yet Rose ends up in bed with him. Patrick, meanwhile, gets a date with the pneumatic local barmaid. Judith seeks solace from her chess-playing ex (Lloyd Hutchinson). Does love, wonder two of the men, make you brave or a coward?

Lucy Bailey’s production moves fluently between the play’s various locations in and around the family’s home. The kitchen, where Lily plays patience and watches TV with the sound down, becomes a beach, where she dances on the sand with John and Rose. The library where Judith works occupies the space taken earlier by the pub.

The play itself doesn’t really go anywhere. Yet such is the quality of the writing and performances that it doesn’t really matter. Much of the work’s richness comes from its literary echoes - Yeats and Chekhov, naturally, but also Shakespeare and the Bible. Fred Astaire and Marlene Dietrich figure too. The play’s own world produces echoes, as in the touching moment when a tape recorder poignantly supplies the absent mother’s joyful singing voice.