Gerard Stembridge’s funny play, That Was Then, now getting its American premiere at Geva Theatre Center,
makes an interesting point about the everlasting battle between the Irish and
English: Their roles have been reversed.
Ireland is enjoying an economic and
population boom and replacing its agricultural industry with high tech industry
and its dependence on English trade with European and US trade. England’s
economical leadership is losing ground against the Euro; the previously
superior-feeling upper class in the UK is showing insecurity about its cultural
leadership.
Does the play make these reversals
clear? Well, no, but they underlie the farcical behavior that keeps this lively
comedy from becoming a nasty social fracas — or at least from feeling like
one.
The comedy is about an Irish couple in
Dublin who invite a pretentious English couple to dinner to try to get the
wealthy English to lend them money. Noel is an Irish builder trying to pull off
a shady deal changing the zoning of some properties and thus raising their
values. He is a drunken oaf but underneath a sly operator.
June and Julian, ostensibly a successful
English foreign correspondent and his topnotch-accountant wife, have a hidden
shady side too: they manipulate investment tricks. A mutual friend therefore
suggested that Noel and his wife, May, invite them for dinner.
Six years later June and Julian are
bankrupt and are losing all social status, so when they hear that Noel is now a
tycoon, and visiting London, they invite him to dinner. Both dinners are
disasters but work out, however antagonistically, because these are greedy
people with sneaky agendas of their own. This time Noel and his new young wife
want to move to London and become nouveau riche aristocrats, and the English
want to get away from creditors and snubbing friends and move to Ireland.
In fact, the whole comedy is about
role-reversals, and the conflict between “then” and “now”; but it takes a whole
act before the interplay begins to gel and clarify the comic reasons for
crunching together two time periods, two dinner parties in different countries,
and two couples. Then we can appreciate why it all adds up to five people
onstage simultaneously acting out two different events and rapidly switching
back and forth from guests to hosts, attacking and beseeching at the same time.Â
Stembridge said that he wanted to write
about Irish themes in “an English play” and was apparently thinking of the
clever comedies of Alan Ayckbourn, at least four of which view the same
characters in different settings at the same time. But That Was Then also reminds me of the Irish Marie Jones’ Stones In His Pockets,which also has actors switching roles
in mid-sentence.
That’s where all Stembridge’s seemingly
distracting story-telling tricks work out. Instead of writing act one in
sequential time with the English visiting the Irish in what winds up a horrible
dinner party, then act two with the Irish visiting the English at an equally
disastrous dinner, he has both dinners onstage simultaneously.
Noel switches back and forth between
drunken host and teetotaling self-assured guest. Julian goes in a second from
arrogant guest to defeated, imploring host. May, the likable, inept Irish
hostess, becomes an invisible extra while a new wife plays guest. And June is a
haughty guest, then would-be gracious hostess.
The dinners don’t get served until act
two, when the switches become virtuosic and really funny. And the theme of the
changing English-Irish situations as well as their endless underlying
antagonism becomes lucid. And maybe the audience begins to generally understand
what in hell is actually happening onstage.
A fine cast seems to have fun with all
this carrying-on. Guy Bannerman somehow makes the vulgar Irish Noel actually
likable. And his instant switches from cold, secure, articulate wealthy man to
hotheaded, snarling drunk are bravura comic displays. I’d like Remi Sandri to
be less appealing as the snooty visitor to better contrast with his whining
jellyfish after Julian’s fortunes reverse; but his two personas are certainly
clearly defined. Sandri’s outrageous slapstick sufferings (knocking over or
spilling the meal he tries to serve, or wearing it on his shirt, stumbling and
sliding under the table, then banging his head on it) are the play’s most
effective identification as a farce.
Aileen Quinn as Noel’s very young second
wife is bright and entertaining in an underwritten role. As Noel’s first wife
May, Peggy Cosgrove is as amusing as her limited role permits and surprisingly
warm and lovable. Megan Byrne’s June is either uninventive or directed to be
too singly sneering in her haughty responses to everyone but her husband. Her
variety was in her English accent in the first act.
Given the almost excessive cleverness of
the script, director Mark Cuddy brought both lively physical comedy and pacing,
and also an overall clarity of movement and behavior that I thought very
impressive. Perhaps the dramatic set-up requires that sets, costumes, and
lighting are ingeniously initially designed but hardly develop in any way once
the play begins and the people dress for dinner. The audience seemed to be
amused throughout, whether they got all the in-jokes or not. Not everyone may
have noticed, for instance, that the women’s relative ages are in their names:
May, June, April.
That Was Then by Gerard Stembridge, directed by Mark
Cuddy, plays Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 4 and 8:30 p.m.,
Sundays at 2 and 7:30 p.m., through February 6 at Geva Theatre Center, 75
Woodbury Boulevard. Tickets $13.50 to $48.50. Call 232-4382, www.gevatheatre.org
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2005.
