Fly Me To The Moon, Marie Jones’s black comedy about two innocents who succumb to temptation with farcical consequences, returns to Belfast’s Lyric Theatre in a new production bolstered by performances that adroitly mine the piece for all its banal domesticity and madcap mayhem.
Much of the pleasure comes from Jones’s sharp characterisations, dexterous plotting and polished ability to shift between hackneyed mundanity, heightened drama, extreme emotions and laugh-out-loud front-cloth comedy, tonal accents from 1930s Hollywood screwball films seamlessly blending with the crackpot twists and turns of a Whitehall farce laced by bluntly droll Northern Irish humour.
Originally written as a one-act lunchtime show for Òran Mór and Paines Plough’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint series at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 2010, it expanded into its current full-length form in 2012 when it enjoyed a well-received run in New York. First seen at the Lyric in 2015, it travelled from there to Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre and more recently was revived at Belfast’s Grand Opera House in 2019. Such is Jones’s ability to write plays with staying power and repeatability, and, happily, Fly Me To The Moon has lost none of its audience-pleasing draw.
Constant through all its iterations has been Katie Tumelty’s Frances, joined here by Maria Connolly’s Loretta stepping with comparable aplomb into the shoes of Tara Lynne O’Neill and Abigail McGibbon before her.
The two are underpaid, overworked care workers with troubles enough of their own at home tending to aged, housebound Davey. Having passed away during a visit to the toilet where he remains hidden throughout, he’s as vivid an on-stage presence as the two “angels” who become unwitting flies enmeshed in a web of their own making as Frances realises his pension and his bookies’ winnings are there for the claiming. If only she can persuade Loretta.
It’s a clever conceit that the temptation impossible to resist is a mere £600. Hardly on the scale of the Brink’s-Mat heist. Which is just as well, neither transgressor qualifying as criminal masterminds as Jones embroils them in various schemes, self-justifications and abrupt changes of plans as faltering consciences kick in, and a dénouement that renders their ham-fisted conspiracy altogether unnecessary.
Tumelty, who was involved in Fly Me To The Moon’s initial development, plays Frances with sassy, skin-tight assurance, bravura certainty delivered with astutely underplayed boldness.
Cut from a less tightly-woven cloth prone to quickly unravelling, Maria Connolly’s Loretta readily latches on with complicit abeyance to Tumelty’s incitements, only to rue playing Laurel to the other’s Hardy as wobble-headed paroxysms of doubt overtake her. It’s enough to make you want to give her a hug and tell her to breathe in, breathe out….
On John Leslie’s subtly altered, serviceable split-screen set carried over from earlier runs, Jones directs with a sure-footed familiarity that allows Tumelty and Connolly ample room to frame and focus their own engaging partnership.
One cavil: noticeable on press night were vocal deliveries that didn’t always make their way to the back of the auditorium, waves of laughter from those closer to the stage breaking midway leaving those beyond straining to catch up.