There are exceptions to the rule that young dramatists don’t really find their voice until a first play has been staged. Christian O’Reilly, whose full début, The Good Father, is Druid’s contribution to the Galway Arts Festival, is not one of them.
His play is a voyage of discovery, as much for the writer as for the audience. What makes the evening exceptional, though, is the sheer brilliance with which that journey is mapped out. Director Garry Hynes and the actors, Aidan Kelly and Derbhle Crotty, make a great virtue of the necessity of cutting a way through to the play’s heart.
The great compliment that is paid to O’Reilly’s intimate story of a couple in search of a relationship is to take it entirely on its own terms. We are given a man and a woman in their early 30s. Tim is Dublin working-class, a painter and decorator. We are not told what Jane does beyond the fact that she has a good job, but she comes from much plusher coastal suburbs, Portmarnock perhaps or Malahide.
They do not belong together. They have drunken sex minutes after meeting for the first time at a New Year’s Eve party. Their relationship thereafter is built around fantasies of fatherhood. Jane has an immaculate conception. Tim is like Joseph the carpenter, building in his own head a story that makes sense of the miracle. Neither ever really talks to the other because each is conducting a kind of interior monologue.
They are asking themselves the kind of questions an audience asks about a play. Why are these people on stage together? What are they thinking? Are they really connected or is at all just a trick of language?
In this sense, O’Reilly is thinking aloud about the whole idea of a piece of theatre, wondering whether it is really possible for characters on a stage to mean anything. If Tim and Jane know so little about themselves, how can they reveal those selves to us?
It is the kind of question that only a serious dramatist would ask, and it says much for O’Reilly’s potential that this is where he has chosen to start. His handling of dramatic action is so obviously skilful that he could undoubtedly have written a much slicker but much less interesting piece. His great good fortune is to have found a creative team with the guts to push his questioning all the way.
As so often with the best of Garry Hynes’s work, The Good Father is driven by a relentless disregard for danger. With an untried work by a still emerging writer, the instinct of most directors would be to build in as many safety nets and escape clauses as possible: elaborate sets, realistic props, all the comforting details of stage business that can fill in a play’s gaps. Hynes’s instinct is to do precisely the opposite, to cut away every convention that creates the illusion of theatre, to start, as O’Reilly himself is starting, from scratch.
The space created by Francis O’Connor’s stage design and Rupert Murray’s lighting is both naked and fiercely intimate. The audience sits in two rings of chairs around a tiny sliver of a playing area which has, at most, one or two pieces of basic furniture. The lighting is stark, monochrome, relentlessly refusing any hint of mystery or magic. There is nothing for us to go on except the words and movements of two people who are struggling and generally failing to communicate themselves to each other.
We rely completely, then, on the nerve and integrity of Aidan Kelly and Derbhle Crotty. Everything depends on their willingness to remain exposed to the play’s uncertainty, to resist the temptation to fill in the blanks and join up the dots.
There is no one you would trust more with this task than Crotty, who as well as being the finest Irish actor of her generation is also the bravest. She seems always to walk a millimetre above the ground on an invisible high wire, giving her a taut alertness that commands absolute attention.
There is no finer compliment that could be paid to Aidan Kelly, then, than to say that he rises perfectly to Crotty’s level. Kelly is a revelation. He has the ability to work his way completely inside O’Reilly’s language, so that every phrase, however rhetorical, is fully embodied. The gap between the actor and the role is so narrow that he hardly seems to be acting at all.
This is just right for a piece of theatre whose power lies in its refusal to pretend. It is what is it is: the bones of a play, stripped bare, exposed to the light that shines through it, but identifiably, unmistakably human.
• The Good Father runs at Druid Theatre, Galway until Sunday, July 28th.
Fintan O’Toole
Tuesday, July 23, 2002