The black and white morality of 19th-century melodrama is embodied literally in B*spoke theatre company's production of The Drunkard, as a black-clad villain and white-suited philanthropist
battle it out for the salvation of the inebriate of the title. Tom Murphy has rewritten an American play, by WH Smith and A Gentleman, which was a popular hit in New York in the 1850s and given it an Irish setting, with music composed and performed by Ellen Cranitch and Helene Montague, and
Victorian ballads sung by the cast.
It's no surprise that the author of The Gigli Concert should be attracted to the rich potential of music theatre, and loquacious drinkers have thronged his plays over many decades. As in his original work, as well as his adaptations of Goldsmith and Chekhov, Murphy's sensitivity to linguistic nuances and his facility with period pastiche are evident here.
Pitching her polished production somewhere between pantomime and morality play, director Lynne Parker handles the declamatory style, exaggerated gestures, stock characters and formulaic plot with clarity and consistency, managing to reign in performances (by Stephen Brennan and Pauline McLynn,
in particular) which, at times, threaten to go right over the top. The lighter comic touches of Sarah-Jane Drummey, as the drunkard's devoted young wife, are perfectly judged.
While Monica Frawley's bare set design is sleek and sophisticated - a raked, brilliant green platform framed by an electric blue, asymmetrical arch - the absence of scenography or props places more weight on the script and plot than they can bear, exposing the conventional thinness of the form.
Without the extravagant visual spectacle that was an enormous part of the raison d'etre of this genre, we are left with a vacuum, which, in this production, the musical interludes have to fill - with only partial success.
The plot of the original was a tool in the recruitment drive for the 19th-century temperance movement in the US, portraying a decent young man brought low by his enthralment to alcohol - but inevitably redeemed. This production has no such agenda; it would be difficult to discern in it any useful insight into alcohol addiction or recovery in a contemporary context.
The work of a playwright and cast having fun, it is a celebration of theatricality, artifice and the exuberance of melodrama. What's missing, crucially, is emotional engagement.
