Abbey Theatre - Amharclann na Mainistreach

Virtue truly triumphs in send-up for our times

Sunday December 26 2010

WE need to be transported to a land fit for heroes in these harsh times — and believe it or not, it’s a possibility for audiences frequenting the Abbey’s Christmas offering of Boucicault’s Arrah-na-Pogue.

It’s joyous, it’s touching, it’s funny, it’s fantastical, it sends itself up rotten, but takes the work itself with an absolutely straight face, which is the only effective way to stage comedy melodrama.

The result is a confection of pure charm, carrying us away from ice-compacted streets, water rationing, and every type of winter irritation stemming from local (and possibly central) government incompetence, to a time and a place where virtue triumphs, dastardly deeds get their come-uppance, and dashing chaps get rewarded with the hands of beautiful maidens. In fact, decency triumphs all round.

Boucicault created a world which possibly had more basis in reality than revisionist history would like us to think. Post-independence history-writing painted a picture of landlordism as unyieldingly rack-renting, with all tenants and peasants downtrodden, never daring to raise their eyes or their voices to the hated “ruling class”.

But just as a century later communities in Northern Ireland were polarised by leaders who fomented hatred, Irish history has frequently been written from the somewhat skewed perspective. Dion Boucicault, on the other hand, liked the idea of good versus evil, and saw no class as having a monopoly of either.

Hence, in Arrah-na-Pogue dashing Beamish MacCoul, a landlord and squire, is a revolutionary leader in circumstances reminiscent of the 1798 rebellion.

Having fled to France, he returns to claim the hand of wealthy heiress Fanny Power, ward of the equally noble-hearted Colonel Bagenal O’Grady who is steadfastly pro-establishment. Beamish hides out in the cabin of flower-like peasant Arrah Meelish, daughter of his wet-nurse, and thus his old childhood companion. Discovered, he flees, and Arrah is disgraced as a harlot, only her own beloved Sean the Post believing in her innocence.

Sean sacrifices himself to save Arrah from hanging, but as usual, all ends happily after a wild farrago of horseback dashes through midnight countryside to appeal to the Secretary of State, and a courtroom scene where nobility of soul flourishes on both sides of the bench, and indeed all around the place save the black heart of the process-server Michael Feeny who lusts evilly after Arrah.

Director Mikel Murfi has grabbed the piece with both hands, whirled it round in the air, and defied his audience not to suspend disbelief. He mixes lightning fast comic set-pieces with gently languorous and wistful love scenes (when Aaron Monaghan as Sean the Post sings the proscribed ballad The Wearing of the Green at his wedding, yearningly rather than rousingly, it raises the hairs on the back of your neck). And Murfi stages it in Sabine Dargent’s eye-blinkingly authentic set, with hilarious facsimiles of stage “effects” of the 1880s, and more than a few wickedly 21st century nose-thumbing visual jokes thrown in.

The cast are wonderful: Peter Hanly as Colonel O’Grady, Rory Nolan as Beamish MacCoul, and, as mentioned, Aaron Monaghan as Sean the Post. Mary Murray is a vision of wistful innocence as Arrah, and Mary O’Driscoll is the born-to-command Fanny (one can’t help feeling sorry for what Beamish has let himself in for).

There’s a splendidly spluttering good-hearted but pompous Major Coffin from Michael Glenn Murphy, a snivelling Michael Feeny from Jack Walsh, while Ciaran O’Brien and Peter Gowen provide comic cameos as the Secretary of State and his manservant. The delightful costumes are by Niamh Lunny.

This is Christmas (or anytime) fare par excellence for the whole family: lavish, stylish escapism with even a tremulous grip on the way we might like the world to be rather than the way it is.

-The Sunday Independent