Cork Arts Theatre

An Ireland in which devout mothers sew rosary beads into their daughters’ underwear is the setting of John B Keane’s rough-edged comedy The Chastitute. In this hopefully invented society, the Catholic Church rules like a rural Taliban.

Keane is always careful to temper his exaggerations with remembered actuality, and there are still enough echoes of that clerical certainty to help the plot survive its challenge to likelihood. This is a deceptively entertaining play, and it would be hard to match its quality as a vehicle with which to launch the Cork Arts Theatre’s new repertory company, given its racy theme and imagery, its adaptable setting, and its pliable cast numbers. In this case, six players offer more than 20 characters and all of them with conviction.

The narrative simply records the efforts of an ageing bachelor farmer to overcome the humiliation of life-long virginity.

The thrust of the piece as an observation of rural loneliness and depopulation is sacrificed to the comic potential of titillation and detumescence dancing in a dual purgatory.

One could make too much of this story of a man’s wistful but clumsy lust in a plot packed with the fertilised agricultural metaphor characteristic of Keane’s writing. This is the aspect which director Dolores Mannion and her cast deliver as they iron over the creases in the script (incidentally, that other iron has no place in a kitchen with electricity) to concentrate on the despairing grapple for sexual gratification.

Yet this is, or could have been, also about the yearning for loving companionship, an element nodded at, literally and wonderfully by Michael Murphy as the matchmaker. Instead, it submits to the dominant tone of a play which, dated and ultimately misogynistic though it may be, gives justified scope to the various talents of Aidan O’Hare, Leo Conway, Martina Carroll and Fionula Linehan.

Runs until April 28th