Connie
Theatre Royal, Limerick
★★★☆☆
In the dilapidated grandeur of Limerick’s long-abandoned Theatre Royal, Connie resurrects one of the city’s own. Written and created by Ann Blake and Joanne Ryan, this immersive, site-specific production staged by Lime Tree Theatre reimagines the extraordinarily novelistic and tragic life of the actor Constance Smith. Combining archival footage and music, and featuring Pom Boyd as the local who became a Hollywood star, it is cleverly staged and highly entertaining.
The setting is perfectly suited: the cavernous old cinema hall, reopened for the first time in 30 years, is the very place where Smith’s films would once have been screened. The audience sits around an open thrust stage scattered with earth, a square of white linoleum at its centre suggesting a sparse room. Around a flickering television, women in muted pastels sit slumped, one sweeping idly.
When the TV shows one of Smith’s films, a patient recognises the woman with the broom as the glamorous figure of Connie on-screen. She denies it vehemently – a little too vehemently.
The patients spring to life as benevolent deities. Connie, they reveal, has died “of natural causes, so that’s good!”, and lingers in the bardo. To move on she must relive her past, re-enacted by these supernatural guides.
What follows, under Blake’s direction, is a rapid-fire biography, tracing Smith’s life in vignettes: her birth in 1929 Limerick; a childhood of poverty under a domineering Catholic mother who forces her into a lookalike contest she wins for her resemblance to Hedy Lamarr; her time at a London finishing school where Irish accents are erased and poise drilled into place; and her early success at Fox Studios under Darryl F Zanuck, whose notorious abuse of power included the invention of the casting couch.
From there, her decline feels horribly inevitable: an unwanted abortion, sexual coercion, a failed marriage, alcoholism and public crises, including the stabbing of her husband and multiple suicide attempts. Her brief fame is relentlessly overshadowed by tragedy.
Boyd is joined in the cast by Shirani Bolle, Meg Hennessy, Gene Rooney and Johanne Webb. Their performances are precise and energetic, the pacing brisk. Multiple screens project fragments of Smith’s films and stylised re-enactments that blur the line between her public image and private despair.
It is visually clever and often gripping. Yet the vignette structure allows only surface glimpses; her story never escapes from the familiar arc of the doomed, glamorous starlet, and the deeper reality of her life is never fully felt.
In the final act the audience is invited to witness Smith’s unmarked burial with soil brought from London, a reverent gesture intended to right wrongs, to honour her spirit and secure her lasting recognition. What should be moving instead feels corny and unconvincing. The language of reclamation and celebration is predictable, and a little dated, even if the general sentiment is commendable.
One can sense the playwrights’ determination to rescue Smith from the irredeemable facts of her biography, to grant her a happy ending that history never allowed. Watching her spirit being carted off to heaven, the illusion of consolation feels futile and oddly depressing.
Even so, the play remains an entertaining and effective presentation of Smith’s extraordinary and deeply tragic life. A figure worth remembering and a play well worth watching.
Connie is at the Theatre Royal, Limerick, until Sunday, November 2nd
