Review: Irishtown, Every Irish Cliché in One Hilarious Play

If you’ve spent as much time sitting in the dark at Irish Repertory Theatre as I have, you’ve surely noticed some recurring themes: small towns, family secrets, forbidden yearnings, and (so often) three actors who can only speak about them in direct address to the audience. Those clichés have now exploded onto the Irish Rep’s mainstage in what playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth calls a “putrid green rage” in her wickedly funny satire Irishtown, now making its world premiere.

It opens on the table read of Who Are We If We Are Not Ourselves At All?, the latest play by Aisling (Brenda Meaney) following the successful mounting of her last, The Happy Leper of Larne, by Dublin’s Irishtown Players. They’ve got four weeks to rehearse before they fly off to New York for the premiere—not nearly enough time to defuse the grenade that actor Quin (Kevin Oliver Lynch) tosses onto the table when he wonders aloud if the play is Irish enough for an American audience.

Aisling’s script dramatizes the aftermath of a sexual assault in Hertfordshire, England and bears a passing resemblance to Prima Facie, but with three actors instead of one. “We are an Irish theatre company, bringing a sexual assault court drama set in England to New York,” Quin twists the knife with the courtly language of collaboration, “I’m just trying to interrogate that.”

Complicating matters, the show stars Aisling’s girlfriend, Síofra (Derry Girls star Saoirse-Monica Jackson), who has caught the eye of director Poppy (Angela Reed), a Brit who was recently banished from the RSC for sexual misconduct. Grand dame of the stage Constance (Kate Burton) has seen it all before and knows how this story ends—but she’s still hoping that this leaky vessel might carry her away from the theater and toward a film career. “Not Irish films,” she hastens to add, “good films. American films.”

Smyth has taken the time-honored form of the backstager and dipped it in green, poking fun at sensitive writers, self-involved actors, and furiously dissembling directors. She’s not afraid to draw laughs from taboo subjects like sexual assault and its artistic exploitation, a fearlessness that is this play’s most Irish quality.

The insanity builds slowly but surely under the direction of Nicola Murphy Dubey, who recreates the scrupulously polite vibe of early rehearsals, a mask that very quickly drops into a sea of whispers during the five-minute break.

Lynch is convincing as the chief instigator, an independently wealthy man with a high opinion of himself, and he does a fantastic job of concealing Quin’s own deep dark secret until the end. Burton brings a weary musicality to a character who gets many of this play’s best lines, which she consistently knocks out of the park.

Meaney’s intensity is perfectly matched to a playwright on the cusp of her big break (or breaking point). Jackson beautifully launders Síofra’s furtive shrewdness in ditsy innocence. Reed’s quietly terrified Poppy acts as an air brake on this Irish train wreck, her English aversion to conflict ensuring that the play never reaches its emotional apex until the exact right moment.

Colm McNally’s set is the rehearsal room as a terrarium, a taped-out floor and a back room bulging with old props and costumes (many, I assume, fished out of the Irish Rep’s own collection). Costume designer Orla Long captures the latest in theatermaker chic (I especially appreciated the angular and fuzzy cardigans). The work lights (by McNally) pulse during scene transitions, underscored by increasingly frantic percussion (sound by Caroline Eng), the aural equivalent of a car speeding toward a cliff’s edge.

We arrive at the brink of disaster when Aisling threatens to pull her script and storms out, leaving the three actors and director to devise their own play based on what they think Americans want to see from Irish theater. Friel, O’Casey, Walsh, Beckett…no one is safe from this epic ribbing, which rechristens the Irish Rep in laughter.

Smyth reserves her most pointed critique for the fashionable American manners around identity and representation that have so infected (and hobbled) the artistic process worldwide. As an American critic, I can only offer her and all foreign theatermakers a humble apology, but also a question. Why can’t you be more like the French and tell us to feck off? Irishtown is a delightful indication that, at least on Éire, they’re more than ready.