Plays about the Irish experience of emigration and exile have become so common that they are almost a sub-genre in Irish playwriting studies. But Kaite O'Reilly's play is a rarity in that it comes at the question from a different perspective and from the other side of the Irish Sea.
Or more precisely Birmingham. Here, more than 20 years ago, came young Fergal and his bride Maura, part of the great haemorrhage of Irish emigration that built the city and the roads after the war. As one of the characters says: "Spaghetti Junction - that's a great Irish work. Forget fucking Ulysses."
Then came the Birmingham pub bombings, and to be Irish was to be reviled and spat at in the street. Maura kept her head down and spent pounds on elocution lessons to ensure her children Seaneen and Aine grew up sounding as if they came from nowhere.
But now Aine has reinvented herself as a professional Irishwoman, working as an oral historian and colonising the memories of Irish emigrants, Seaneen doesn't give a damn about Ireland and thinks of himself as a European, and Fergal is dying. Maura decides that it is time to go back home to the farm where she was born. But first she wants to walk through the streets of Birmingham with her head held high on the St Patrick's Day parade.
This is a little play, but a really lovely one. It deals in cliches but often makes them seem new-minted. You never mind for a moment that the characters have paint-by-numbers attitudes carefully designed to create maximum dramatic conflict, that the plotting is obvious from a mile off, or even that there is a classic stage Irishman. The pleasure of O'Reilly's play is in the way she revels in these cliches, celebrates them and subverts them. It is also in the easy, generous flow of the writing, with its mixture of wit and singing lyricism.
O'Reilly loves these people and sends them up rotten at the same time, just as she sends up the audience's preconceptions and prejudices about what it means to be Irish and explores whether it is better to travel light or take the past with you wherever you go.
Rachel Blue's design, dominated by a grainy torn photo of the Irish landscape, cleverly unites a play that takes place in the real world and in the mind, in individual experience and the collective unconscious, both now and then. Anthony Clark's nifty production does well to disguise some of the play's construction fault lines. Great performances, too, particularly from Iain McKee as the pragmatic Seaneen, who doesn't understand why you should get more upset about the potato famine than Rwanda or Kosovo, and Eileen Pollock as Maura, whose face turns to scarred granite when she realises that there is no home left to go back to.
Until December 16. Box office: 012-1236 4455.
