Marie Jones's smash hit comedy was revived and revised for its 25th anniversary in 2021 by Barn Theatre, directed by the writer's son, Matthew McElhinney, for a production that returned to its original home, Belfast's Lyric Theatre, a year later. The same cast and creative team have been reunited for this short tour of co-producers, ending here in Bolton.
This is a complex, multi-layered and often moving piece of theatre with just two actors playing a whole cast of characters, but it isn't one of those frantic knockabout comedies of confusion we've seen so many of recently at the Octagon where the quick changes of character and scene are the main gag (and the grandaddy of those, The 39 Steps, will be here next year). This talented pair can become a different, recognisable character by the shifting of a hat or jacket or just a change of stance, and a piece of rope hanging from a hand can convincingly become a walking stick.
The backdrop is a rural part of County Kerry, where a Hollywood film crew has arrived to film a romantic blockbuster and is using some of the locals as extras. But, as the play says near the end, this is a piece "where the extras become stars and the stars become extras"—nearly a decade before Ricky Gervais had the same idea—and so it centres on two of those locals, Charlie Conlon (Gerard McCabe) and Jake Quinn (Shaun Blaney), passing time and philosophising in quite a Godot-esque (perhaps via Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) manner.
Charlie comes across as the happy-go-lucky one of the two, until he reveals later what that façade is hiding, while Jake is initially focused on doing as he's told to get his €100 a day but gets increasingly demoralised with the way they are being treated by the film company. This is initially sparked off by the film's American star, international sex symbol Caroline Giovanni, apparently coming on to him in the pub, when she only wants him to teach her his accent—and he has to go through security vetting just to have coffee with her.
Then his cousin Sean, who is desperate to be in the movie but grows increasingly unstable due to a drink and drug problem and so is thrown off the set and even out of his own pub, walks into the sea with stones in his pockets and doesn't walk out again. Of course the funeral clashes with filming, and the company's public expressions of sympathy don't match with their concerns about losing a day's filming.
On top of that is a view of the changing economic situation, from Charlie's complaints about Amazon Prime putting his DVD rental shop out of business to, in a flashback to Jake and Sean as kids, worrying about the future of farming in the region, and whether they will be able to take over their father's farming and butcher's businesses as their fathers took over from previous generations.
This production adds projections from Benjamin Collins and Alex Tabrizi on the front of a marquee and a separate screen at the back, which don't always add much to what is going on onstage but are sometimes effective—and they show some very familiar faces joining in the Irish dancing at the end. It runs to 2½ hours, which is long for a comedy and feels it sometimes, although McElhinney's direction uses variations in pace very well between the rural scenes, the waiting around on set and the rush to get the crowd scenes 'in the can' before the light goes—filming the extras watching the lovers meeting on horses just before the interval is hilarious.
The two actors are impressive throughout. Amongst others, McCabe is the pretentious American star actress trying to fake sincerity, the film's director, the Scottish security guard and Sean's friend Finn, while Blaney is the young female assistant producer, cousin Sean and the old man Mickey who tells everyone he is the last surviving extra from the film The Quiet Man with John Wayne. Many of these characters are beyond caricatures and are able to move the audience as real human characters.
But the real story focusses on the growing bond between Charlie and Jake that results in, despite everything, a hopeful ending. Perhaps it would benefit from trimming a bit off the running time, but overall, the performances and the writing are brilliantly successful to create an evening of laughter and tears with a story of real human warmth emerging from the superficial glitz and glamour and fake emotion of the movie business.