Druid Theatre Company’s outdoor setting of Thomas Kilroy’s Chekhov adaptation is perfectly chosen for its historical resonances. Coole Park, the former estate of Lady Augusta Gregory, playwright, folklorist and co-founder of the Abbey theatre, is an apt backdrop to Kilroy’s elegant transposition of the play to the west of Ireland in the 1880s. Replacing the Russian aristocracy with the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, he retains the sense of an old order on the brink of collapse, infusing this with specific references to absentee landowners and agitating peasant farmers refusing to pay their rent.
Although its full title is “after Chekhov”, Kilroy’s version (from 1981) is faithful to the essentials of the play, with the extended Desmond family and friends gathered for the summer on a remote country estate. Visiting from London, the grand actor Isobel Desmond (Eileen Walsh) has brought her lover Mr Aston (Marty Rea), a successful novelist. Resented by Isobel’s playwright son, Constantine (Jack Gleeson), Aston is of increasing fascination to their young neighbour Lily (Agnes O’Casey), an aspiring actor.
In a humorous nod to Lady Gregory’s own plays, the radical new work that Constantine presents to the assembled group is a mythological soliloquy: “one of those Celtic things”, his mother says in disgust. Isobel’s brutal dismissal of her son’s efforts reflects this production’s emphasis on a deep generational divide and indifference to young people’s struggles: how the middle-aged characters try to stifle the young’s ambition for new forms – of writing, of theatre, of life.
With the exception of the wise Dr Hickey (Brian Doherty), no one takes seriously the suicidal declarations of the nerve-wracked Constantine and the whiskey-tippling Mary (Bláithín MacGabhann) and they remain curiously unaffecting. Chekhov described this play as having “little action and five tonnes of love”. There is less love in evidence here: obsession and self-destructiveness, certainly, with performances that underscore the characters’ histrionics more than the nuances of relationship dynamics or the interplay of the ensemble. The setting remains the star of Garry Hynes’ production, with tall trees framing Francis O’Connor’s delicately slatted wooden set, open to the sky as darkness falls, awaiting “the rising of the moon”.
At Coole Park, Galway, until 21 August. Online from 5-12 September as part of Galway International Arts festival.
