The Cure
Cork Arts Theatre
★★★★☆
Two productions separated by a fortnight display Cónal Creedon’s gift for bringing light into dark places (and coincide with his winning of the World Cultural Council’s Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts for 2024). These plays offer the evidence, if it were needed, as they revisit the originality and vivacity of his work for the stage.
With The Cure, which is presented by Hiya Fella Productions, Creedon’s passionate affiliation with the vernacular develops as something close to a testament. Navigating by his nose, Ciaran Bermingham’s Seán follows the city-centre trail that will bring him to the early-hours pub for the cure of an early-morning pint in what could be described as a Christmas camino. With his head, as he says, boiled from drink, his wandering thoughts are distilled into the disappointments of a lifetime.
In this recall it is the delivery rather than the narrative that punctures familiar truths with the comedy of world-weary scepticism. Bermingham’s forehead wrinkles into derision to imply the unspoken sneer. In a voice of rust and disparagement he questions change and decay as many of the milestones of his early-morning observation serve now as vanished outposts, suggesting a vanquished life.
So far unchanged, however, is the bruised fluency with the local idiom that enriches a monologue of reminiscence, revelation and, maybe, recovery. Directing this brilliantly balanced enactment of poignant comedy, in a walk through a landscape that in its self-discovery is more pilgrimage than meander, Al Dalton keeps a measured pace while Bermingham plays many parts, all of them dense with association and commitment.
Cillian Murphy: ‘You had the Kerry babies, the moving statues, no abortion, no divorce. It was like the dark ages’
The Dublin couple who built their house in a week
John Creedon: ‘I was always being sent away, not because they didn’t love me, but because they couldn’t cope’
Halloween in Ireland: the best free family events to go and see in every county
The Cure is at Cork Arts Theatre until Saturday, October 26th;
After Luke
Cork Arts Theatre
★★★★☆
In After Luke, Creedon’s rearrangement of the parable of the Prodigal Son, his freewheeling narrative is anything but reverent, taking a detour into hilarity as soundtrack and lighting crackle with synchronicity. This Lost in the Canon presentation is a reminder that the Evangelist himself left a few gaps in his parable, not least a backstory including the prodigal’s mother, otherwise completely lost in the canon.
First performed in 2005, After Luke might be called the unauthorised version where Son, never otherwise named here, clings to the peace and pace of his father’s motor-repair business and freewheels through life in his hobnailed boots. The younger Maneen, who has wider ambitions, flaunts off to England only to return penniless and temporarily humble.
The possibility of caricature has not been evaded entirely, as both young men are not so much overdrawn as overwrought. Too much is made of Son’s ungainly simplicity, of locality and, perhaps, of the prodigal Maneen’s gloating manipulation. Despite this superfluity, the performances from Niall Holland and Simon McKeon bristle with rage and resentments while Leon Danza’s light directorial touch balances the farcical with the gospel’s own sobriety.
It isn’t often that a negative ending is seen as satisfactory, but the vigour and home-grown hilarity of this treatment create an appetite for alternatives when, having played the parent’s part, Mike O’Dowd’s Dadda abdicates in weary recognition that the boys, after everything, will be boys.
After Luke has ended its run at Cork Arts Theatre
