Theatre
Tarry Flynn (National) The Best of Times (Bridewell)
Village people
Sheridan Morley
Into the National Theatre, though only until the end of this week, from the Abbey in Dublin has come what seems to me quite clearly the production of the year. Even in as rich a time as this for new Irish drama, this utterly amazing and joyous rediscovery of Patrick Kavanagh and his early biogra- phy of a recalcitrant youth in the County Cavan of the middle 1930s stands out as nothing less than the Peer Gynt of its own time and place.
Conall Morrison's adaptation and pro- duction starts out, thanks to the equally dazzling choreography of David Bolger, with a small, backwoods, already forgotten village community stamping its feet into the unforgiving earth, and if that sounds a lot like the opening of Martin Guerre, well, it is, though not for any copycat reason. Two productions, starting roughly simulta- neously, have simply hit upon the same metaphor for a village tale in which the earth is really all there is between the life and death of its occupants.
From there, Tany Flynn heads off into an altogether different direction; those of us seeking signposts in an unfamiliar terrain will find Billy Liar and Larkrise to Candle- ford and especially Under Milk Wood of some assistance, but none of them even together adds up to the unique experience on offer here. Tarry himself is a likely lad on the make in, and eventually on the run from, a stiffing community; part-Peter Pan, part-Puck and part-devil, he is an unlikely hero in that there is nothing essentially lov- able or even likeable about him despite James Kennedy's mesmerising perfor- mance, the best by a newcomer (at least to me) that I can recently recall.
Around him, a cast of 30 Abbey stalwarts led by Pauline Flanagan as his equally unforgiving mother (and again, the echoes of Aase in Peer Gynt are at their strongest when these two are together) play out the various villagers, hostile neighbours, girl- friends, mad priests and daughters of this lost community, though in one sense you could argue that a nearly three-hour play is really only about Tarry plucking up courage to quit for the big city, a courage he finds only through the last-minute inter- vention of a long-lost and equally wayward uncle.
Tarry Flynn is in no sense a tidy play, but its central theme, that of a raggedy man who will never accept his non-place in the world, nor that where he is born has to be where he is to die, has the haunting quality of a half-finished landscape, or of some- where only half-recollected in a dream.
As in the pioneering work of Theatre de Complicite, the cast doubles as chickens, heifers, fields and fences, at times becom- ing a complete farmyard, at others just a hostile force for oppression and age-old enmities. The greatness of Kavanagh's orig- inal memoir, first published 50 years ago, lies in its love-hate observation of the Irish village as a force for both good and evil, and this first-ever staging captures all its original power. Tarry is never a hero even in the sense of Billy Liar; he's a dour, vengeful, repressed and angry spirit who will probably come to no more good in the big city than he ever has in his native vil- lage. And yet there's just enough of a spark in him, just enough of the possibility of redemption through love, to make us care and hope for the best for him. If there was to be yet another signpost, it would I think point toward Billy Bigelow, the fairground barker of Carousel, written in the same late 1940s and set again in a backwoods com- munity from which death is often the only escape. Tarry avoids that at the last by sim- ply packing his few belongings in a suitcase; but the suggestion is that he will never real- ly escape his neighbours, most of whom take the dour view that hell will not be full until he is safely in it.
Like a young Hume Cronyn, Kennedy holds the centre of this picareseque, parochial, hugely inventive epic; and if some management does not now give us Tarry Flynn in the West End or on Broad- way, the rest of the theatregoing world will have glimpsed only all too briefly what may well turn out to be the Irish classic of the decade.
As for the music of the old Broadway, nobody does it better than Jerry Herman; his own recent anthology may have died a speedy New York death but across the last 30 years, from Hello Dolly! through Mame and Mack and Mabel to La Cage aux Folles, he has been the most assured show-song- writer of all those anthems for large ladies on even larger staircases, from Merman through Channing to Angela Lansbury, even if at the last, when it came to La Cage, they were really only large men dressed up as large ladies on large staircases.
So now, at the tiny Bridewell, we get around 60 of those showstoppers in two hours; sure there are problems, not least a singing American pianist who could have given Liberace a lesson or two in schmalz, and some choreography dating from ocean- liner concerts of the early 1950s. There's also a woefully uncharismatic cast, in which only Garth Bardsley and Melanie Marshall stand out as the stars they are one day going to be.
But, and it's a big one, those Herman songs remain just wonderful; for some rea- son he is still not given his due credit as the last survivor of the old Rodgers-Hammer- stein-Berlin school of sheer joy. Somehow, in order to love Stephen Sondheim you had to be seen to hate Herman, which is rather like the notion that if you liked Cole Porter you had no reason to love Larry Hart. It is Herman who still writes all the songs we really need when we are down and out, their titles alone suggesting a kind of resilient optimism and simple courage now hopelessly out of fashion and favour 'We Need A Little Christmas', Put On Your Sunday Clothes', 'I Am What I Am', `Open A New Window', 'Just Go To The Movies', 'Tap Your Troubles Away', 'I'll Be Here Tomorrow', 'I Promise You A Happy Ending'.
No musician since Irving Berlin has given the world so much to sing about from an all-American viewpoint; the difference is that, whereas Berlin's songs were essential- ly mindless pap, Herman's are sung by drunks, losers, gays, transvestites, all of whom find first in them and then in them- selves the courage to carry on regardless. Sure, it is a sentimental and simplistic notion of survival against the odds, but it is also resilient and touching and tremen- dous; this is what musicals were made to sound like before they got melancholia. And talking of the greatness of the Ameri- can show song, for this week only Barbara Cook is at the Donmar Warehouse and Steve Ross is at the Pizza on the Park, both back at the very top of their considerable form; miss them at your peril.
`I think it says "Daycare".'
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