Greta Garbo really did visit Donegal, in 1970, as the guest of an English painter, but in his new play Buncrana playwright, Frank McGuinness fictionalises the occasion backwards to the summer of 1967, with Ireland on the brink of the recent Troubles and Scott Mackenzie singing of trips to San Francisco with flowers in your hair.
Ireland is on the verge of violent change, two couples are on the verge of ending, a woman tries to save her family, a girl tries to save her future. Above it all but in the midst of things, determining what happens next, is the loveliest and lonelie
st of all women, the great Garbo. But when the gods arrive, they can cause havoc, not least to themselves, as the divine Greta learns.
McGuinness is an award-winning Irish playwright and poet. His considerable body of work includes: Gates of Gold (Finborough,West End),There Came A Gypsy Riding (Almeida), Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (Hampstead), Someone Who’ll Watch over Me (Hampstead,West End and Broadway), The Factory Girls (Abbey Dublin and Tricycle) and recent translations of Euripides’ Helen (Globe) and Oedipus (National Theatre).
It’s a good set-up that could have backfired but doesn’t thanks to the witty discretion in how McGuinness presents the catalytic arrival of the reclusive star in the Donegal backwater, and the raw passion with which he writes the ensuing domestic crisis
This engaging new play is set between controlled loneliness and expressive family bickering. It is almost in the tradition of the outsider who alters the status quo, but the volatile Hennessys are already capable of explosive change - clever daughter Colette’s exam results precipitate an exchange of cruel truths between her unfulfilled parents and her unmarried aunt as she determines to go to Dublin to study medicine.
The family are servants in a grand country house, once their home, now owned by successful artist Matthew Dover. The outsider is none other than the 62-year-old Swedish screen goddess, a friend and admirer of the artist. Caroline Lagerfelt does her best to make this strange, elegant creature human, but (and the quotations in the programme suggest this is accurate) she is mainly a collection of self-absorbed pronouncements dressed up as aphorisms. McGuinness is a humane writer, however, and he provides her with an unlikely attraction, which betokens recognition of loneliness as much as love, to old maid Paulie, finely played by Michelle Fairley.
Dover’s handsome, violent lover, recalling Francis Bacon’s relationships, is not perhaps menacing enough in Tom McKay’s performance. Angeline Ball as Colette’s annoying mother Sylvia finds her vulnerability. Robert Jones’ inside-outside set is delightful and Nicolas Kent’s direction is in tune with the play’s moods.
The symbolism of the cruel, beautiful peacock, weirdly glamorous in this rustic outpost, is rather too emphatic.
