Three Short Comedies by Seán O’Casey: Remarkable slapstick rages against authority

A Pound on Demand, Bedtime Story and The End of the Beginning strike against conservative society. Photo: Ste Murray

Pavilion Theatre, Dublin

★★★★

There is no pleasure without pain, everyone knows, but the early-century Ireland of three Seán O’Casey comedies selected by Druid seem to be more about the hurt than the enjoyable things in life. Both A Pound on Demand and The End of the Beginning date from the state’s conservatively infant 1930s, and Bedtime Story comes from the rebelliously adolescent 1950s. All three are early strikes against a history of civic puritanism.

Take all the disapprovers in A Pound on Demand, a taut comedy where two friends looking to continue their cheerful night out arrive into a post office. One man (Rory Nolan) soberly tries to coach the other, who is drunkenly wheezing and flailing in Aaron Monaghan’s tremendous physicality, to withdraw one pound and continue their spree. It isn’t the drunk’s inability to steadily hold a pen that impedes them, but the refusal of a glaring postal worker (Venetia Bowe) and the interference of a policeman (Liam Heslin), as if the elite public servants were finding the men wanting.

That this all goes down with the slapstick rhythms of a Molière comedy might surprise those familiar only with O’Casey’s major plays. Director Garry Hynes, whose career has traversed 20th century Irish theatre, knows well how to electrify these old-school gags – see the long arc of the pair of shoes in Bedtime Story, where Monaghan plays a devout man trying to sneak a woman (Sarah Morris) he slept with out of his lodging house. Realising she has become this holy man’s dirty secret, she turns the tables, convincing him he has led her astray and sentenced her to a lifetime of shame. (She also robs him).

Bedtime Story was clearly written a safe three decades after O’Casey’s star run in the 1920s, a period where he incited a riot and had fallen out with Abbey Theatre director W.B. Yeats, and the disruptions that preceded it - the objection voiced by Morris’s woman while being rushed out the door (“You wouldn’t turn a hair if I went out in my shift!”) makes the same sartorial reference that set off the rioters at The Playboy of the Western World’s premiere. At one point, a suave neighbour, nicely played by Heslin, describes Yeats as someone who asked troublingly existentialist questions, while living in a lofty tower, and ended up inspiring a long line of imitators. This seems both a dig and a compliment by O’Casey.

Not that the playwright didn’t also pull at the thread of reality. As the screwy title suggests, The End of the Beginning is a full-blown farce, dealing in improbabilities. A wager between a husband and wife has them swap their work duties for a day. Nolan plays a slacker, left alone to do household chores, but instead rehearses a music hall performance with his friend, who is a delightful nerd played by Marty Rea.

Among the innovations of Francis O’Connor’s set are advertisements on the walls which read like reminders from Big Brother. (The post office in A Pound on Demand has a placard saying: “Saving certificates WILL SAVE YOU”). In The End of the Beginning, it’s a notice saying “DO IT NOW.” It’s probably a reminder for the lazy husband, hung there by his wife. But in choosing to give the play remarkable diversions, providing a sequence of gags pyrotechnic enough to make for a grand finale, O’Casey seems to be rejoicing in going against authority.

Runs at Pavilion Theatre until 11th December, and then touring to Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny and National Opera House, Wexford. druid.ie