Transferring to the West End from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, John McColgan’s unapologetically crowd-pleasing production of Dion Boucicault’s 19th-century comic melodrama is panto for grown-ups, explicitly inviting the audience to cheer the hero and hiss the villain, and shamelessly milking every opportunity for laughs and sentiment. That great showman Boucicault might very well have given this approach his wholehearted approval, but it sometimes sells the play short in its eagerness to please.
Boucicault’s rough-and-tumble drama is certainly packed full of improbable incident, but it also possesses a political dimension. The narrative has a Fenian hero, Stephen Darcy’s clean-cut Robert Ffolliott, returning clandestinely to his Sligo homeland from exile in Australia, little realising that dastardly, moustachioed villain Corry Kinchela (Stephen Brennan) is seeking to deprive him of his liberty, his estate and his fiancee.
Don Wycherley’s good-natured rogue Conn, the vagabond of the Gaelic title, slips in and out of the intrigue, invariably accompanied by his cute dog Tatters, while in the background Rory Keenan’s fair-minded English officer, Captain Molineux, woos Fiona O’Shaughnessy’s husky colleen, the hero’s sister.
The cast throw themselves into the action with gusto, none more so than Wycherley, who bounds up and down Francis O’Connor’s elaborate, picturesque set before swinging across it on a rope at the show’s climax to thwart the villain.
There are times, however, when one wishes that everything wasn’t being played quite so much to the hilt. Everyone on stage appears to be winking at the audience as if to say we shouldn’t take anything too seriously. On top of this, Riverdance co-creator McColgan brazenly exploits every chance for a spot of paddywhackery, sending his cast into a boisterous jig at the drop of a hat.
But Boucicault’s play is actually more astute and intelligent than McColgan allows. The teasing, tentative relationship between O’Shaughnessy’s breathless Claire and Keenan’s plummy Molineux explores a possible accommodation between Irish patriots and English redcoats while their nimble verbal exchanges actually challenge knee-jerk Irish stereotypes. Each time Molineux begins a sentence with the patronising phrase “You Irish…” Claire nips his words in the bud.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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