Thirty years ago members of Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille created a now-legendary collective theatre piece called The Farm Show, the result of their first-hand investigation of the life of rural farmers in Ontario. Michael Healey wrote The Drawer Boy as a "tribute to those who had the courage to knock on the farmhouse door". This co-production between the Galway arts festival and the Irish National Theatre has some North American star power on its side in the form of John Mahoney (Martin Crane in TV's Frasier). Yet the actor who commands the evening is a Briton, David Calder.
The two portray ageing farmers whose lives are changed when they agree to put up a callow young actor, Miles (Conor Delaney), who is working on a play modelled on The Farm Show. Angus (Calder) has a condition similar to autism: he remembers very little, so every evening Morgan (Mahoney) tells him the sad story of their past. Having overheard the secret telling of this story, Miles performs it on stage in front of the men, and Angus's memory is stirred: by seeing himself enacted he somehow can become an active participant in his own life again. Gradually the true, less comforting tale of the older men's lives comes out.
The central message of the play is the transformative power of theatre, and Healey cleverly toys with ideas of fiction and truth throughout. But something rankles deeply about the way the character of Miles functions, particularly as he is over-played here by Delaney. At first he is a ludicrous oaf, and most of the first act is played for laughs at the ways he and Morgan clash. We are presented with a huge abuse of the men's trust when Miles performs their story, but any investigation of the ambiguity of this action is precluded by the effect it has on Angus.
Calder's enactment of this transformation is very moving, as is his performance throughout. But the director, Lynne Parker, cannot coax equally strong work from the other two: Delaney is just trying too hard, and Mahoney is not communicating enough.
Theatre people want to believe that what they do matters, and Healey has written a play that putatively proves that it does. But he asks too much of his audience by asking us to embrace the value of The Farm Show as wholeheartedly as he does.
· Until August 10. Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222.
