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Dolly West's KitchenDateline: 06/04/00 By Frank McGuinness The poet W.B. Yeats, one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland, could not understand comedy. He wanted plays that would "bring to the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland" and simply could not see how comedy could do this. In fact, what he called "the modern taste for comedy" led him to despair about his theatre. In this he was like many who see drama and tragedy as "serious" and comedy as "frivolous": how can anything which provokes laughter have anything meaningful to say about life? Patrick Mason points out in his programme notes that this lack of understanding about comedy led Yeats to underestimate the work of O'Casey. But Yeats was not alone in attitude to comedy: the same attitude led to a profound misunderstanding of the work of Chekhov so that so often his work was presented almost as melodrama. When we look back at Irish theatre since Yeats' day, we see that its strength has been the comedy which reveals the bleakness and tragedy of life, and the heroism of those who survive it. Like Synge, like O'Casey, like Friel, McGuinness uses laughter as just one of the means to lay bare the souls of his characters. Dolly West's Kitchen is set in Buncrana, County Donegal, just across the border from Northern Ireland, between 1943 and 1945, the last two years of what the Irish called "The Emergency". Ireland is a neutral country and yet its army is on full alert, for there is a deep-rooted fear of possible invasion by the British. Justin West (Michael Colgan) is an Irish army officer with an almost pathological hatred of the British and when he hears that an old lover of his sister Dolly, Englishman Alec Redding (Steven Pacey), is stationed just across the border, he tries to ban him from the house but is overruled (thwarted, he would say) by the rest of the family, not just Dolly but his mother and sister too. In a sense his fears are justified, for an invasion does take place, although not in the military sense. Redding does arrive, and so do two American soldiers, Marco and Jamie, brought home by his mother, Rima West, and their arrival constitutes an invasion of all aspects of the life of the West family: Justin, Dolly, Rima, his sister Esther and her husband Ned, and their servant Anna. This is not the breaking up of a peaceful idyll, for there are already tensions and strains within the family. But the arrival of these three very different men brings about an invasion of all aspects of the life of the West household - relationships, marriage, sexuality, family life - and the notion of neutrality is exploded. No one can escape invasion by the outside world and the idea that people can somehow distance themselves from their surroundings, can refuse to commit, is totally destroyed. Like all the best comedy, tears are not far below the surface and it is to the credit of the strong cast that they don't emphasise either to the detriment of the other. They play it straight, allowing McGuinness' words to speak for themselves. The performances are uniformly good: this is ensemble playing of the highest calibre. If, ultimately, the character of Jamie does not totally convince, this is not the fault of actor Harry Carnahan, and if the transformation of Anna is not quite one hundred per cent believable, Lucianne McEvoy is not the one at fault. I felt there was a little weakness here in the writing, and neither of these characters were as fully developed and rounded as the others. The real gem of the play, both in the writing and in the performance, is the character of the mother, Rima West, played with evident enjoyment and great conviction by Pauline Flanagan (who, incidentally, won the Samuel Beckett Best Actress award for her performance at the Abbey). Dolly West's Kitchen runs until 5th August. Dolly West's Kitchen Articles Indices:
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