Fresh from its debut in the Dublin Fringe Festival, Rose Coogan’s Rose+Bud brings its sparky, sassy, sour-sweet tale of life as a young transitioning woman to Belfast’s Lyric Theatre courtesy of Commedia of Errors.
Coogan’s autobiographical two-hander attempts a demanding sleight-of-hand in portraying herself as two characters: the confident, extrovert woman she wants to be, and the shy, mother’s boy she was. It’s a device that glancingly calls to mind Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (another Dublin Fringe debutee) and Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. Unfair comparisons given Coogan’s youth, but pointing even so to a device that requires greater sophistication than Coogan the playwright has yet to muster, and a technical dexterity that Coogan the actor and fellow performer Conor Cupples have yet to acquire.
What it lacks in those regards, Rose+Bud makes up for in the sincerity and courage of Coogan’s self-portrait, and in laugh-out-loud, nail-on-the-head lines that suggest her budding sideline as a stand-up comedian may well be a more fruitful pursuit.
Living in a backwater County Down town and molly-coddled by his mother, Bud is painfully aware that there is another life elsewhere—and inside himself. Both aspirations are satisfied by his going to study drama in the more cosmopolitan Derry, where the already tentatively emerging Rose is able to more fully realise herself—“the emancipation of me from myself”, as the play’s most pointed line declares. Rose+Bud’s punning title alludes to the flower-in-waiting about to bloom.
Although delivered with engaging commitment and peppered with choice bon mots, that surface gloss doesn’t distract from the shortcomings of script, performances and Benjamin Gould’s production. Surprisingly so, given its three years in development.
The fault lies with the script’s formulaic treatment of its twinned themes of coming-of-age and becoming the person you feel yourself to be. It’s a blend of the commonplace and the specific that is never satisfactorily integrated. Coogan and Cupples bring sympathetic enthusiasm to their core roles, but their indistinct doubling and more of other characters too often bleeds one into the other. Gould’s unobtrusive direction similarly wants for definition, resulting in the longueurs that afflict the latter part of this 70-minute piece.
Garth McConaghie’s sound design artfully inks in snatches of telling LGBQT+ anthems, while Tracey Lindsay’s perfunctory set hints at the slender resources Northern Ireland’s theatre companies have available as they near the end of two decades of annual funding cuts.
My cavils aside, the slender first night audience reacted with approving appreciation.