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, that’s 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.
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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 that’s what they are.
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Until February 11. 020-7565 5000