Moll
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
***
It's easy to understand why the Gaiety Theatre is ready to commit to the massively popular work of John B Keane, producing one of his plays a year. It isn't immediately clear, though, why it should begin – in this co-production with Verdant Productions – with Moll.
Perhaps it is because of scarcity: Keane has hardly been neglected over the years. Recently, companies such as Druid have mined his earlier works - Sive, The Year of the Hiker and Big Maggie - for their revelatory, darker veins. Moll may not lend herself so readily to reinvention.
A wily matriarch who becomes the housekeeper of a Kerry presbytery, fattening and plámássing the Canon (an effortless Des Keogh) while starving and manipulating his two flanking curates, this butter-wouldn't-melt Moll essentially belongs to a sitcom. Director David Horan's bright and buoyant production isn't shy about which sitcom, either. Advertised with mildewed imagery, the production seems nostalgic, but in tone and performance it pines more for 1990s Craggy Island than 1970s Kerry; a place of simple conflicts between hapless priests and pushy housekeepers in a changeless world.
You'll hear that in the dialogue, from stray "go on, go on"s to merrily unironic predicaments ("Well, for better or worse we have a new housekeeper") and you'll see it squarely in the casting of Fr Ted alumni. Patrick McDonnell appears as the effete Fr Lorcan, a sort of proto-Dougal, while Frank Kelly cameos – to Fonzian levels of applause – as the Bishop. More refreshingly, Clare Barrett brings a comic actor's flair to Moll, lending her character's power grab a hum of spry physical embellishments and expressive asides, where not even the dusting seems grim.
Her nemesis, Damian Kearney’s exasperated Fr Brest, is similarly inclined to play it up (at one point he blesses himself as though swatting away a fly) but the comedy of a helpless and dependent clergy comes without the recognition of its stranglehold on women’s rights in the 1970s.
Moll may be self-interested and cruel to the point of psychosis, but her combination of entrepreneurship and extortion builds a school, fixes a church and secures her a pension. It is the matriarchs who are building the nation. Elsewhere, blithe jokes about birth control and hasty marriages glance at a time when such things were a real battleground.
One gag, when Moll raises a duster, like a periscope, to spy from behind a door, underlines a much more cartoonish reality: here, the giggles come first. They are served as well as anyone could. But Moll’s manoeuvres, using bingo to swell the coffers, working as her canon’s agent for a commission, suggest a country whose faith has moved from God’s providence to that of the marketplace. In a production determined above all things to be bankable, that again seems like something to believe in.
Until June 21
