Owen McCafferty, in such plays as Closing Time and Shoot the Crow, has vividly portrayed his native Belfast as a city of lost illusions. This later piece, first seen at the Edinburgh Traverse in 2014, deals with a more universal ennui relieved by brief sexual encounters. But, although it deals with the casual links between two couples, I found one pair totally believable and the other wholly incredible.
McCafferty writes persuasively about the frayed nerves and unfulfilled dreams of a couple who have been married for 30 years. Tom is a plumber and Joan a supervisory dinner lady and their scratchy resentments reach boiling point when Tom reveals he has had sex with a young woman he met in a hotel bar. Tom may be partly fantasising, but McCafferty catches well the mutual frustrations of the long-married.
In the play’s most resonant line, Tom declares: “I was ashamed I hadn’t been unfaithful.” Meanwhile, Joan makes up for her own unlived life by hiring a male escort and going to the same hotel frequented by her husband. All this strikes me as perfectly plausible. Marriage may be an institution, but it is one from which the inmates occasionally seek parole. However, it is either deft plotting or outrageous coincidence that Peter, the escort hired by Joan, turns out to be the lover of Tara, who supposedly went off with Tom.
It is the young couple who pose the play’s problem. Peter may fabulate to please his clients, but it was never clear to me what had actually driven him into the sex trade. Tara, who relieves the boredom of her life as a supermarket checkout girl by picking up an older man in a hotel bar, strikes me as a middle-aged writer’s fantasy. Either that or I’m going to the wrong bars.
What links all four characters is a sense of being cheated by life: the oldsters feel they have missed out on sexual adventure, while the youngsters express a vague resentment at the educational system. But in his bracingly panoramic Scenes from the Big Picture, seen at the National Theatre in 2003, McCafferty related the pervasive angst of people in Belfast to specific economic issues. In contrast, this piece lacks a social context and therefore makes half the impact.
The play has been re-produced and recast since Edinburgh and is perfectly well done. Director Adam Penford and designer Richard Kent make good use of the bruising intimacy of this pop-up theatre, and the acting is sharp. Niamh Cusack suggests all the stored-up rage of Joan which she releases in the bedroom games she plays with her hired lover, and Sean Campion catches particularly well Tom’s initial brusqueness when he finds himself solicited over his post-work pint. Matthew Lewis and Ruta Gedmintas have a tougher time making you believe in Peter and Tara, but just about get away with it. What struck me most about this 75-minute piece was that frustration with life works best when it is given a local habitation and a name.
- At Found 111, London, until 8 October. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
