O Go My Man ( Archived )

Reviews

A savvy stew of love and sex

Benedict Nightingale, The Times, 19 January 2006

THE title of Stella Feehily’s new play is an anagram that at first defeated me. But, no, it doesn’t translate into mangy moo, as I thought, but into monogamy. And, as the title hints, thats something beyond the characters to sustain. Welcome to what one of them calls the New Ireland -“apolitical and amoral, believing in celebrity chefs and reality TV.”

Feehily has written, Max Stafford-Clark has directed and Out of Joint has produced what is tantamount to the Dublin version of Patrick Marber_’s _Closer, that portrait of rackety, desperate relationships in an equally godless London.

Feehily’s play is savvy, smart and witty, and yet somewhere beneath the cynicism about love, sex and the whole damn thing there’s a wishfulness: if only men, women and children could stay together and be happy.

This piece is ambitious, refreshingly ambitious, maybe even over ambitious, as state of the nation plays often are. Atrocities in Darfur and elsewhere in Africa are persistently mentioned, putting these Irish people’s emotional chaos into perspective but, in one case, helping to explain it.

Ewan Stewart’s Neil is a maverick TV war reporter, sickened by what he has seen, yet inexorably drawn to it and terminally dissatisfied and restless. This is bad news for Zoe, Aoife McMahon’s faithful wife of 15 years, and dubiously good news for Susan Lynch, the actress with whom he proceeds to set up sexual shop.

As in Closer, relationships shift, eddy, tumble, recover, fail. Sarah dumps Paul Hickey_’s amiable if pernickety Ian, with whom she has lived for ten years, savagely telling him that she dislikes everything about him, from his smell to his jokes to his touch. He launches into a loveless affair with Elsa, Denise Gough, a young TV producer unapologetically addicted to success and casual sex. Meanwhile, poor Zoe has a brief fling with the young stud she discovered through a dating service – none too successfully, to judge from her vengeful pursuit of Sarah into the theatre where she’s performing the Cheshire Cat in _Alice in Wonderland.

The piece is often very funny, but a bit unclear and perhaps even sentimental at the end. Despite Stewart’s curious accent and blurry diction, it is also well acted, and not only by the principals.

I much enjoyed Mossie Smith as a series of foreigners – airport waitress, hotel maid, Red Queen, vagrant or mangy moo whose task is to look askance at these self-obsessed Irish people and their fluctuating love lives. “Good luck in Happy Town,” she barks at one point, “you pack of shits.”

And in the context of a troubled world maybe thats what they are.

Surreal glimpse of modern Dubliners

Michael Billington, The Guardian, January 18, 2006

They always say the second play is the hardest. But Stella Feehily shows that Duck, which wittily dissected Dublin’s ladette culture, was no flash in the pan. Her new play, which kicks off the Court’s 50th anniversary season, combines a sharp look at the chaos of contemporary sexual mores with a wild surreal humour: imagine Closer with a touch of Lewis Carroll and you get the picture.

Feehily focuses on a group of Dubliners living in a state of noisy desperation. Neil is a TV journalist who, while genuinely shell-shocked by the horrors he has witnessed in Darfur, seeks to escape his nightmares by walking out on his wife and daughter. His new love, Sarah, is a struggling actress reduced to touring in a hip-hop version of Alice in Wonderland. But, while united by panic and desire, Neil and Sarah leave behind them partners who console themselves by exacting merciless revenge.

As in Duck, Feehily reveals a beady eye for the hypocrisies of sex: my favourite moment comes when Sarah’s rejected partner, having himself enjoyed a quickie with a ruthless young go-getter, announces: “In my defence, I was trying to reach out to you.” But Feehily here goes beyond social observation to paint a picture of modern Dublin that has reached a state of hedonistic craziness; and the point is underscored through the choric interjections of a female Polish immigrant who views the constant couplings with an exasperated scorn.

It is the effortless mix of the real and the surreal that makes this a remarkable play; and it is no accident that Alice in Wonderland, with its topsy turvydom, is used to express the sense of modern madness. This reaches its high point in a funny, painful scene where Sarah, trapped inside the sweaty costume of the Cheshire Cat, is confronted in her dressing room by Neil’s abandoned wife. In one exhilarating moment the scene becomes a comment on the absurdity of theatre and the while justice of revenge.

If the play has a fault, it is that Neil seems too much of a self-laceratingshit to attract anyone. But Max Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint production is packed with exuberant energy and high-octane performances.

Even if Ewan Stewart can’t reconcile one to the agonising Neil, Susan Lynch as the fugitive Sarah, Paul Hickey as her rejected partner, Denise Gough as a rampantly ambitious TV exec and Mossie Smith as the caustic observer are all first-rate. But the great joy is to find Feehily, while exposing the monotony of monogamy, also attacking the madness of a world that idolatrously worships fame, sex and celebrity.

My O my, this is must-see modern morality

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 20 January 2006

SO OFTEN a theatre that takes itself too seriously, the Royal Court rang to laughter this week. The drama generating this response?

An expletive-peppered Irish play about broken love affairs, rushed lives and a war reporter who is having a nervous breakdown after visiting one death camp too many.

O Go My Man is a dazzling, if bumpy experience. It veers crazily between comedy and anxiety. On Tuesday night the audience frequently didn’t know whether to chuckle or hush, so fast did things cartwheel between sex and sadness, farce and depression.

Various Dublin adulterers, led by war correspondent Neil (Ewan Stewart) and struggling actress Sarah (Susan Lynch), become tangled amid one another’s betrayals. Mr Stewart, with his weak chin and fading raffishness, is perfect as the middle-aged TV journalist who has become raddled by the ‘atrocity tourism’ of his trade.

WATCHING his performance certainly made one wonder how those tough-guy BBC and ITN war reporters bear their nightmares. How, after seeing rape and pillage abroad, do they ever cope with the petty vexations of domestic life back home?

Neils brittle wife (Aoife McManhon) learns of his affair. They have a row at the airport and decide to separate – even while the tannoy is requesting patrons to take home their rubbish. Their daughter (Gemma Reeves) is the main victim of her father’s selfishness.

One moment she is depicted as a figure deserving our pity. A few scenes later she is cavorting with everyone else in slapstick, joy-restoring finale. Such are the wild leaps of mood in this show.

Playwright Stella Feehily crams her scenes. More than once the truth is told by a passing observer (a shop assistant/a hobo/a waitress at a party, all played with agreeable battiness by Mossie Smith).

One instant the ingeniously adaptable set is a sleazy hotel room, the next it is a theatre dressing room, then a fashionable gallery. Each set change requires little more than five seconds of quickstep music. Director Max Stafford-Clark, returning here to the theatre he ran throughout the Eighties, certainly shows the Royal Court a trick or two.

Amid a frolicking cast, Miss Lynch bestrides the show, often in fishnet tights. She hurls herself into proceedings that she doesnt mind flashing yards of cellulite and a marvellously wobbly naked bottom. She’s fast, passably pretty, full of comic grace notes.

O Go My Man (an anagram of monogamy, which Miss Feehily perhaps prefers to all this turmoil) is brash, buzzy and maybe also a little messy. Its creator seems to be imploring her adult audience to wake up to the ephemerality of our age, an era in thrall to the dictatorship in the new.

Couples nowadays often split because they are entranced by the brief novelty of another attraction. TV audiences, similarly, soon forget about humanitarian disasters reported from some distant shore. Everyone’s always hankering for the next thing, flash over familiarity.

For all our sophistication, it’s stolid, creased, crumpled old love that makes us human. Not such bad advice.