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Scenes from old Ireland
BIG MAGGIE
Pentameters
“A POUND weight between the eyes, you’ll be getting,” says she of the play’s title Big Maggie to an imagined adversary in this intense revival of JB Keane’s play.
Keane, a Kerryman, publican and playwright, remained in the top half of the Second Division in the cannon of Irish playwrights until the Hollywood film of his play The Field starring Richard Harris and directed by Jim Sheridan – thus elevating him to Division One alongside Tom Murphy and Thomas Kilroy: no longer just a North Kerry storyteller!
Actor/director Tom Begley’s production motors along at a rip-roaring pace, sometimes at the expense of minor characterisations.
Keane’s central character Big Maggie boasts an extraordinary performance from Susan Cummins. Maggie Polpin, a resentful widow, has a shop, farm and young family to keep running; she has become a victim of her own strength of mind and individually.
Some 25 years of living with a philandering husband had made her cynical and hardened. Like the metaphorical old sow that devours her farrow, she alienates her children and has them either moving ‘across the pond’ or living under her authoritarian rule – much like DeValera’s priest-ridden free state of post World War II. But, as they say, you have to be cruel to be kind.
Maggie exposes a licentious two-timing would be son-in-law (Tom Begley), insults and rebuts a potential suitor, stonemason Byrne (an engaging performance by John Casey) and deters the opportunistic Madden family from an alliance with one of her sons Maurice (Napolean Ryan).
The final scene is very moving with Mggie on stage alone, telling the audience of her uinnhappiness living in cruel, rural Ireland, (pre-Common Market and globalisation) where women were second class citizens and where a man with a spread of land was good catch.
Until May 20
020 7435 3648 |
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