View from the Green Room: Portlaw Players open Chapter 3
Portlaw Players.
Portlaw Players opens Chapter 3 of their now annual event of pub theatre in the Clodagh Bar. It’s an event that is focussed on entertainment and comedy is always front and centre.
Much of what happens brings me back to the golden days of Tops when sketches made and broke shows. How often did we hear the dreaded Flaggy Lane critic’s "loved the singing, loved the dancing BUT the comedy was cat"?
Tonight’s comedy has its audience reeling with laughter from curtain up. ‘Fitness Freaks’, written and directed by the Portlaw Poets feature Freddy Kelly and Dermot O’Sullivan as feisty, jealous, bitchy tigers in tights and leotards and their half-hearted attempt to get into shape. Or, at least, into the shape they once had before the kids came along and daytime snacking became a feature.
Bitchy gossip characterises their dialogue… "when did you first notice you were puttin’ on the weight?...how did you get into the eatin’?...would you ever try the Kilimanjaro weight jab?...all the skinny jeans youngwans are on it…I hates that Katie Savage wan who is definitely on it…and did you see that wan that just came in through the letterbox?"
Enter Teddy O’Brien and Derek Delaney with a case full of weight-reducing drugs, along with Alyssa Flannery as Fitness Coach, for a subsequent Garda drug raid before our hapless pair abandon the gym for the chipper and the Chinese. "For research." Hmmm?
Derek Flynn’s black-comic ‘Heroes and villains’, directed by Bill Stafford, features stressed-out jewellery-robber Benny (Brendan Ahearne) who finds himself in the post-robbery "safe house" with the enigmatic innocent owner (Dervla Walsh).
Bungling Benny’s got a gun and has no idea what to do after the heist that’s gone pear-shaped. He’s waiting for Frank who doesn’t answer his repeated phone calls and his captive is talkative…could we watch the soaps?...I’ll fill you in on what’s happening…I’m only sayin’…how did you get into the robbin’?
‘Heroes and Villains' is a tense thriller with clever twists, ironic comments, lots of black humour and a surprise ending – which I’m not going to reveal here.
‘The Tale of Curraghmore House’, adapted from Robert Scott’s original one-act, ‘Rambles on Radio’, and directed by Dermot and Mary Rose Sullivan, is the rib-tickler of the night. This is the play within the play with lots of mini-plays in between. It’s part of a genre of onstage radio plays where everything goes wrong.
A rehearsal does nothing for the play but only ensures that further disasters lie ahead. Alan Ronayne as radio host Christopher, with an ego as big as Curraghmore, recruits a cast of the unwilling - Alyssa Flannery as petrified Georgina, Emmett Cullinane as crazy short-sighted Charlie, Mary Rose Sullivan as busybody Louise who questions everything, Kieran Laffan as reluctant Martin and Dermot Sullivan as hero-of-the-hour Harry – to mount the crisis-stricken drama.
Props man Charlie – who seems to have penned the story - receives constant requests to add to the script with hilarious consequences. Added to that, he’s forgotten his glasses and misses his cues. Knocks, bells, thumps and bumps, whistles and whines all appear at either the wrong time or on the wrong cue. Nobody seems to know their lines or their cues and the resultant mishmash of characters with their own personal issues leads to onstage fights and rows.
It’s a script that calls for a hero. Step forward one-line Harry to save the show by performing every character’s lines in accents that are totally out of place.
Great craic in Portlaw.
