Caroline Curran’s Are Yule Being Served? at Belfast’s The Mac is a sassy seasonal show with a sentimental heart revelling in crowd-pleasing vernacular comedy.
It’s a seemingly simple, straightforward tale of resting actor Scarlett (played by Curran) rushed off her feet while trying to make ends meet waitressing on Christmas Eve in the Wind Your Neck Inn, whose patrons include a wedding, a wake and assorted eccentrics.
The inn’s name a punning play on a Northern Irish idiom, set during any other time of the year, the fast-paced 70-minute three-hander might just as well have been called, appropriating another choice colloquialism, Catch Yourself On!
Curran’s script adds to an extensive strand of robust Northern Irish plays by women that places working class women centre stage on public view, a prominence denied them elsewhere. There’s nothing niche to be implied by that, as the body of work by the pioneering Charabanc Theatre Company, Marie Jones’s Women on the Verge of HRT, and Tara Lynne O’Neill’s more recent Rough Girls all eloquently demonstrate.
Curran has history in the genre. Incarnations of her hugely popular Maggie Muff character, written by Leesa Harker, claimed a regular presence on local stages over the past decade, attracting new audiences each time. With Muff now retired, Curran has produced a wryly knowing thumbnail portrait of every actor’s autobiography: the needs-must necessity to subsidise stage work with spells, typically, in hospitality.
Her acting career a veritable “Ghost of Christmas Past”, Scarlett’s spell in aproned servitude has stretched to 10 long years when the Ghost of Christmas Future announces itself in the guise of an acting contract in America. Her yearning to be elsewhere is brought up short with the sudden realisation of what she must leave behind, the stunted intentions of her love-sick, tongued-tied boss, played with touching believability by Patrick Buchanan, further complicating matters.
Tapping into an essential, albeit bittersweet, Christmas trope, a palpable poignancy underpins Are Yule Being Served?’s otherwise raucous silliness and knowing, tongue-in-cheek nods and winks to more adult matters.
Curran’s personable, sympathetic everywoman Scarlett is as feisty as she is fragile, her doubling as an aged, inebriated and amorously-inclined customer one of several roisterous set pieces in a show whose leanings towards sentimentality are kept in check by characteristically salty Northern Irish sangfroid.
Buchanan and Rhodri Lewis (the titular Frankenstein’s Monster… in one of 2023’s highlights) are splendid foils individually and together in the mounting festive madness as workmates coping with their own hidden, conflicted private lives in the unappreciative glare of public service. And as a diverse array of oddball guests, their drunken Wham tribute act as wonderful as it is deliciously woeful.
Rightfully conceding to Curran and her collaborators’ enthusiastic contributions, Dominic Montague’s direction risks seeming somewhat perfunctory. Slight and built from slender resources Are Yule Being Served? may be, there’s enough grit in the oyster here to suggest that a more interventionist hand in terms of shaping and realising brute point and purpose might yet produce a pearl in any future outings.