The Arts, in the person of travelling theatrical actors doing their society-shaking repertoire, have upset the status quo in the Irish seaside town of Inish. The acting is “too good” and now “queer things are happening” as a result of this exposure to sophisticated, demanding drama. Folks who were “nice and ordinary” two years before now seem suspicious and everyone now assumes a shady past in everyone else. There’s even been an “accumulation of incidents of a slightly criminal nature,” all because the circus wasn’t turning a profit and it was decided to try “serious stuff like Russian plays” instead.
Although Annie, wife of John, opines to offspring that “You’re taking those plays too seriously,” her son Eddie, for one, has succumbed to angst and despair fuelled by the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, the latter who sounds “like a cold in the head” according to Annie’s spinster sister-in-law Lizzie. Seeing such heavy duty drama causes “reflection and ideas” and Eddie, who is now “beginning to realize what life means,” in turn rages at his parents. It seems that “one learns by suffering” and Eddie is no longer “jolly” after a dose of Ibsen. And he is not the only victim of culture, as it were.
Jim Clancy has thrown himself off the pier and Lizzie, albeit her melodramatic approach to truth, reveals a long-concealed secret that she was jilted way back when by Peter, now the local political rep. Moloney has set fire to his business and a couple in town has made a suicide pact, one which has failed because they had only a penny between them and the meter ran out. Slattery, who lives with an unpleasant aunt who will leave him her money when she dies, suspiciously asks to purchase weed killer and then rat killer. Politician Peter, inspired toward integrity after seeing Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, votes against the government.
There’s so much here in Drama at Inish by Lennox Robinson that is pleasant, pleasurable, warmly human, and very entertaining. To name but a few delights, we have the musicality of Irish speech as in Maggie Blake’s Helena, the exquisitely self-dramatizing presence of Mary Haney as Lizzie, the melodramatic and arty posturing of Corrine Koslo’s Constance and cape-waving Thom Marriott’s de la Mare, the subtly interwoven marriage of Donna Belleville’s Annie and Ric Reid’s John, the airhead politician of Peter Krantz, and Julia Course as Christine who wants to be more worldly than she is.
Director Jackie Maxwell achieves an uncondescending, almost loving, tone throughout and gives us both humanity’s foibles and humanity’s charm in one detail-sensitive stroke. The whole cast delivers distinct characterizations, each one filled with subtle touches of individuality and we see before us vulnerable persons and the society they preserve as a shelter for their unspoken lives. We believe they are what they say and when, of the plays, Annie muses, “Maybe they’re too good for the likes of us or we’re too simple for them,” we sympathize for a moment.
But then we remember how destructive all round a self-deceiving and willful innocence in people can turn out to be. Perhaps that’s why Lennox Robinson’s Drama at Inish is, after Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, the second-most produced play in Ireland. It doesn’t mock its characters but certainly exposes them, sometimes in their own willing words, for the self-protecting limitations they are. Drama at Inish also celebrates the acting profession and theatre itself, and we in the audience are inevitably made to consider our own response to both. Are we open to the hard lessons of art or do we run away to mindless and unchallenging entertainment as the folks of Inish and most other people ultimately do?