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FULL OF SORROW - AND FANTA
Kate Kellaway
Sunday January 21, 2007
Hard task... Imelda Staunton (left) and Eileen Atkins in There Came a Gypsy Riding
IT is Gene's 21st birthday but there will be no key to open any door. He committed suicide and was found, two years later, on a white beach near the family's holiday home in the west of Ireland. His family meet on the big, empty day of his birth. Frank McGuinness's new play is so galvanised by death and what it can do to a family that character is secondary. It is as if the living have become, because of what happened, less alive. Their grief is disfigured by anger. This makes the play powerful and weak at the same time: emotionally charged but dramatically stalled. And Gene himself is barely remembered at all.
Margaret, Gene's mother, is an English lecturer, originally from peasant stock. And she, alone of the family, is furiously alive. Imelda Staunton's performance is a marvel. She has perfect pitch as an actress, and a fiery, dogged energy.
Watch the way she guts a fish, runs a tap, slams a saucepan lid. Rage escapes into her hands - she plays her kitchen as if it were a musical instrument. Her ability to embody pain is extraordinary. At one point, she quotes Keats's sonnet: 'When I have fears that I may cease to be ...' and then stops. Her son picks up where she left off. It's a beautiful moment because Keats allows the elegiac tone the family can't find on their own.
Michael Attenborough directs this desperate family adroitly. The daughter, Louise (Elaine Cassidy), is miserably outspoken. Her brother, Simon (Aidan McArdle), is more easy-going but has to fight for the right to think independently. This is the lot of the men of the family: Leo (a wry, composed Ian McElhinney) plays second fiddle to his dynamo wife.
We're in an ordinary, orderly modern kitchen (designed by Robert Jones), sunk into craggy, grey rock. Outside, a tree projects at an unnatural angle like a deer's antlers (it looks as if it might have been blown on stage by last week's gale), suggestive of an unsettled emotional perspective. There is more pain gathering in this room than you'd think one simple, wooden kitchen table could stand. What's more, the family are engaged in the hopeless task of trying to drown their sorrows in Fanta (booze has been banned since Gene's death).
There is only one character fully realised here - and no accident that she is outside the immediate family. Bridget is an old cousin, with a shattered mosaic of a mind. Eileen Atkins, along with Staunton, makes the evening unmissable. As Bridget, she treads a path to dementia in baby-pink gumboots, wheeling a toddler's buggy that the sea has washed in. She has a malicious hold on reality, a wagging tongue and finger. I loved Atkins' calculated dreaminess (all the better to stab you with) and the fluctuating sense that she does not - and absolutely does - know what she is saying.
It is Bridget who contributes the suicide note she has been hanging on to ever since Gene died (it was she who found him on the beach). Faced with the note, the family must now decide how to read it. Is it a curse? Beneath the modern surface of the play, superstition is waiting for them like an old song.
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