As its title implies, Roddy Doyle's new 75-minute play is inspired by the 1967 Stanley Kramer movie about domestic racism, the one that left most us of wondering whether the white heroine was good enough to marry her black fiance. Doyle's play, presented by Calypso Productions as part of the Dublin theatre festival, is warm-hearted and says all the right things, but, like its source, it leaves you feeling that its moral victories are too easily won.
Doyle's setting is a Dublin working-class home where the 50-year-old Larry Linnane patriarchally presides over his wife, three daughters and football-mad son. The shock comes when daughter Stephanie announces that she is bringing a Nigerian refugee friend home for dinner. Larry prides himself on not being a racist - after all, he thinks "Nelson Mandela's a hero and Bertie Ahern a chancer." But dinner is a comically fraught affair, with Larry adopting a tone of white superiority, and guest Ben being shocked by his host's profanity, until all ends in smiles and reconciliation.
Doyle offers a gratified audience a strong dose of liberal uplift. But there's a giveaway moment when Larry, adopting the third-person tone that reveals the play's short-story origins, announces: "He'd been expecting Eddie Murphy - this was more like Sidney Poitier." Exactly so, since Ben is beautifully mannered, besuited, highly religious and a would-be accountant. What's more, when he talks about his family, he reveals that his brother was arrested and that his teacher sister "disappeared". What father, however blinkered, would not be won over by such a guest? It would be a much more morally testing play if Larry were a bit more of an Irish Alf Garnett and Ben were not quite such a middle-class charmer.
In short, Doyle's play falls into the same trap as the movie: it never challenges the audience's own secret prejudices. But it is given a spirited production by Bairbre Ni Chaoimh, in which the three white actors play all six members of the noisy Linnane family. Barbara Bergin is outstanding in her lightning switches from Mona, the all-providing mother, to her chippy, lisping daughter. Gary Cooke exactly catches Larry's oafish vanity, and Maynard Eziashi as the Nigerian guest amusingly suggests he is more impressed by Mona's cooking than by Larry's manners. It's nicely done, but Doyle's feel-good script leaves us basking in a warm glow of self-congratulation.
Until October 27. Box office: 00 353 1-679 5720.
