Dublin’s two principal theatres were jokingly known as Sodom and Begorrah back in the late 1920s, the Abbey because it staged plays with rural and often peasant content, the Gate because of the sexual preferences of its two founders. Both Hilton Edwards and his lover and partner Micheál MacLiammóir were as openly and unapologetically gay as it was then possible to be without being blackmailed, prosecuted or both.
Frank McGuinness’s play, which is set as MacLiammóir lay dying in 1978, tells us rather too little of the history either of the gays or the Gate. But then the pretence is that William Gaunt is an actor called Gabriel, not Micheál, and Paul Freeman a director called Conrad, not Hilton.
Then again, Gabriel isn’t the most reliable reporter of anything, from his parentage to his profession. As he says: “I think that’s why I became an actor. I believe lies.” Anyway, Gaunt’s Gabriel continues to act and fib as he walks round his deathbed and finally sinks into it. Was his father a student priest at a seminary in Salamanca and his mother a Gaelic-speaking Peruvian anchorite who joined an Argentine circus, as he tells his nurse, Michelle Fairley’s Alma? Er, probably not. But does Gabriel detest Conrad, as he ringingly declares at one point, or love him? For all their bickering, the play, and especially its ending, makes the answer to that touchingly clear.
The play doesn’t wholly succeed. McGuinness is too obviously trying to inject variety into an elegiac play by introducing Gabriel’s sister, whose own fantasies spiral into the conviction that she’s Rosa Luxembourg and gave evidence to the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, and by transforming Alma into an Angel of Mercy whose surface toughness conceals guilty anger at the brother who died in a drunken car crash that she survived. It’ s particularly difficult to credit the scene in which she starts angrily hurling oranges at Ben Lambert’s Ryan, who is Gabriel’s gay nephew and Conrad’s former lover, in the belief that he’s that brother.
But one can certainly credit Freeman’s grim, stoical Conrad and Gaunt’s Gabriel. With his white, raddled face, black toupee and deliberately camp voice creating the impression of a pantomime dame on the skids, he makes the most of his character’s lugubriously defiant wit: “Dying is remarkably like being stuck in a traffic jam through Limerick.” But there are also moments when he lets down his theatrical defences and yells or sobs.
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Death is near, very near — and Gaunt catches the bewilderment and the terror.
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