The illusions of memory are alive and well in the south east
The Brewery Lane cast of 'Cass Mcguire'
Cass McGuire (Maria Clancy) fits into Brian Friel’s theatre of escaping or returning emigrants with illusive memory at its core. Cass McGuire returns to her home in small-town rural Ireland after a distance of some 50 years.
She longs to return to the embrace of her brother Harry (David Shee), his wife Alice (Julie La Fontaine), mother Gran McGuire (Jacqueline Delahunty) and son Dom (Jake Tubritt), where she can retire in some sort of granny flat arrangement.
However, the world has moved on and Ireland with it. Cass’s life as a barmaid in a rundown bar frequented by drunks and dropouts, a block away from Skid Row, hasn’t left her with much.
Any pretence of a successful career in the Big Apple is punctured when compared to the affluence of her brother and family that holds a doctor, a priest and a business man along with a Leaving Cert student scholar on the verge of academic greatness.
Cass is also fond of the bottle as the family discover to their embarrassment.
Her garish ways, intemperate and loud language and impetuous nature are impossible to tolerate and her adored brother Harry finds her a bed in a nursing home (on the site of a former workhouse) ironically named Eden House.
The play deals with the internal struggles of a returned Yank in search of an imagined and idealised “home”, that she has fantasised about for half-a-century.
Her “loves” are the loves she has always held of family – mother, Harry and family in a world that has resisted change.
When Harry discloses that he has saved the $10/month she has sent him for his family to give to Cass on her return, she is devastated. She has returned to an affluent and progressive Ireland she no longer recognises, that has no place for her in it, and struggles to come to terms with this.
Cass regularly takes the audience into her confidence in a series of direct addresses as Friel again breaks the fourth wall of the theatre. Several other characters repeat the technique. I’m not a fan.
Direct references to the author and the title of the play break the connection between audience and play. Once a drama takes to the stage, the author’s role is over and the meaning is determined by the audience’s interpretation.
Any author that inserts himself into a play as a character is only getting in the way between actor and audience.
Eden House’s residents have already found their own version of truth and home in an imagined past where lovers and caring parents were faultless.
Cass will come to recognise that she too must create her own version of the past in order to survive in her new present. A series of armchair soliloquies by the main characters reveal their world as it really is – including the unhappy circumstances of their personal lives.
It seems that the only way these protagonists can come to terms with the present in through escaping into a romantic and heroic past.
The residents provide badly needed humour as an antidote to the bleakness of the script. Paula O’Dwyer delights as the gossipy Trilbe; Colm Power is a quirky, academic Ingram; Walter Dunphy brings great fun as down-to-earth farmer Pat Quinn while Suzanne Walsh is suitably aloof as the recently arrived Mrs Butcher who won’t be staying long don’t-you-know! Jayne Tennyson completes the Eden House family as the fun-loving nursing home assistant that becomes engaged.
Maria Clancy is an engaging Cass that never allows us forget the gentleness and love that lies beneath the brash Cass McGuire.
David Shee’s Harry brings out all the internal conflict between a loving brother and a dutiful husband struggling to come to terms with his garrulous sister while Julie La Fontaine is warm and caring as Alice.
Suzanne Shine does well as the director to bring the sense of this wordy and somewhat disconnected script together in a cohesive whole. Suzanne’s pace is strong and her intuitive sense of character creates a wide variety of personalities to colour her restricted stage space.
This column is dedicated to the late Tom Nealon who directed the first production of Cass McGuire back in 1989 and who passed away last year.
Tom was an actor, director, set designer, chairman, and committee member over the years and won several best-actor awards while on the festival circuit. Tom was a gentleman to his fingertips and always gave the warmest of welcomes. God bless you Tom; you were one of our own.
