Can a playwright write his own exit line? That's the challenge the Northern Irish playwright Stewart Parker sets his subject, Dion Boucicault, in this cleverly wrought biographical play. The untimeliness of Parker's own exit in 1988, at the age of 47, is highlighted by this Irish premiere of one of his most interesting works. Directed by his niece Lynne Parker, whose feel for melodrama is fully demonstrated here, it is a welcome counterpoint to Boucicault's The Shaughraun, currently playing with considerably less clarity on the Abbey's main stage.
Against the velvet sheen of Monica Frawley's Victorian stage, we're presented with the ageing 19th-century melodramatist (Declan Conlon) facing his day of reckoning. After an extraordinary career swerving from international fame to penury and back, the Dublin-born master of spectacle confronts his ultimate interlocutor, a garrulous Irish circus performer. Patterson (Owen Roe) insists they have both been engaged in exactly the same thing: playing "Paddy the clown" for foreign consumption. Shining once again, Roe brings such depth to this role that his clown has all the pathos of Feste or Lear's Fool. In his camp leprechaun outfit, carrot-red wig and white face, he leads Boucicault through his past, prodding him to question himself about selling out, plagiarism, morality, artistic value - and above all, his Irishness.
Conlon is superbly assured as he switches tone from defiance to dread, from arch, Wildean condescension to vulnerability. Drawing on anxieties about his own achievement and legacy, Parker's writing fuses artistic, political and psychological themes that still have urgency.
Boucicault's apparent disdain for Ireland is rooted in self-hatred; feeling "obliged to cater for child-like minds" engenders in him a shame that is disguised as arrogance. Excerpts from his best-known plays are gleefully presented by the versatile cast and leaven the serious debate, while the irony and wit of this production carry the script's occasional overworking of theatrical metaphors and the Faustian theme.
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