THE latest play from the Irish company Rough Magic is a rich stew of racism, sexual politics and business ethics. Yet for all the friction that builds up between the protagonists of Elizabeth Kuti’s play, little dramatic heat is generated. There are times when its slow-burn passions threaten to fizzle out.
It’s Dublin in 1850. We’re in the Quaker home of Hannah Tewkley and Samuel, her successful coffee and tea merchant husband. While he attends to the family business and longs for a child, she tries to help the city’s poor, taking under her wing Martha, a syphilitic prostitute, who dreams of joining her sister in America. Into their lives come Sarah Worth, a liberated American slave and now a public speaker for the abolitionist cause, and Alfred Darby, her English free-thinker companion who originally bought her at auction.
These house guests arouse a set of emotions that gradually expose the rocky foundations on which all the characters’ righteousness is built. Samuel is a decent man who betrays his wife for sensual pleasure and economic gain. Hannah is both priggish and full of yearning. Sarah is a passionate speaker, but knows her life is now based on pricking the conscience of others. Alfred won’t admit his own perverse love for victimhood. Through these contradictory feelings, Kuti asks how much compromise we can take in our lives. When does pragmatism become self-serving compromise? When does idealism become self-righteous vanity? At times this juggling act of moral dilemmas is like a lost George Bernard Shaw play. And like Shaw, it can descend into mouthpiece theatre.
The cast still does a good job of navigating the shifting sands of the characters’ consciences. Barry Barnes’s Samuel and Robert Price’s Alfred suggest that each other’s virtues would make an admirable mixture. Susan Salmon, as Sarah, is a strong combination of passion and clear-eyed cynicism. And Jane Brennan imbues Hannah’s repressed and increasingly torn emotions with a touching dignity.
Yet Lynne Parker’s production, staged simply with a giant chest of drawers offering up clothes and props, often becomes a ponderous trudge. It dulls the caustic humour of Sarah-Jane Drummey’s Martha. Sarah’s lectures are powered by lyrical, dynamic writing but her interaction with the other characters remains slightly awkward and stiff.
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Matters aren’t helped by a harpist underscoring key moments. It’s a shame, for there’s much to admire in a play that needs some blood, sweat and tears rather than Quaker-like restraint.
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