Youth’s the Season: The end of ambition in Dublin
At a party in jazz era Dublin, young scenesters are faced with decisions about their future.
Abbey Theatre - Abbey Stage, Dublin
★★☆☆☆
Fewer lines of dialogue will quicker locate you in an early-century morass of psychoanalysis and depression than a question asked in Youth’s the Season -?, the Abbey Theatre’s droll comedy from 1931. “Life’s pretty difficult,” sighs a young woman, anxiously sitting down beside the man of her affections, who smiles amused at her pessimism: “Aren't you being rather Russian?”
Everyone is so modish in this jazz era Dublin they’re wary of sinking into the internal struggles and repression of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky – or more specifically, for playwright Mary Manning, Freudian psychoanalysis via Ibsen. “I’m depressed. I’m sick of everything!” says Desmond, a young designer played by David Rawle, burying his face in the drawing room couch. His solution is very Jazz Age. He decides to throw a party.
Desmond is certainly a fascinating figure – seen as openly effeminate in a previous, understatedly queer Dublin, and joking about settling with a sugar mommy who finds him endearing (“D'you know any rich intelligent woman of forty? Somebody's got to take me in hand”) – but he’s ultimately inconsequential to the plot, except to nudge other characters into romantic rivalries. Manning gets most mileage out of his sisters, both of whom are in separate love triangles rotating through Desmond’s party, and having to make crucial decisions about their future.