If there’s one thing that’s pretty much guaranteed to sap every last ounce of enjoyment from a piece of writing, it’s studying for the Leaving Certificate English Paper II. At least that’s what I thought until I saw Druid’s production of John B. Keane’s Sive – a play I studied ad nauseum for nigh on two years, in the Gaiety Theatre earlier this week.
There is a lot to enjoy in Garry Hynes’ production: the tone is comic and the laughs aplenty despite the play’s tragic subject matter of a young woman forced into an arranged marriage with an old farmer. Tommy Tiernan as the matchmaker Thomasheen Seán Rua is scene stealing – and probably at least partially responsible for much of the ticket sales. The Google suggestions box delivers “Tommy Tiernan” as the fourth suggestion when you enter Sive. Tiernan’s Thomasheen really is very funny, and his onstage physicality arresting, memorable in particular is the image of Tiernan with legs stuck brazenly in the air as he lies back on the kitchen table. Likewise, his only-slightly crooked arabesque as he peers out the kitchen door to the road below. His delivery is every inch the cute hoor. That said, it’s a caricature rather than a character that Tiernan constructs: the nuances and empathy that one, admittedly fleetingly, glimpses in Keane’s text when the matchmaker speaks of his loneliness is lost here, drowned out by roaring, by “bowing and scraping” and by the rapid ingestion of a sheaf of paper – quite an impressive physical feat, to give Tiernan his due.
The production is strong on exploring and explicating women’s roles. Andrea Irvine is very good as Mena, as is Barbara Brennan as Nana (if a little sprightly for an ancient crone) and the mean-spiritedness – in fact the cruelty – of their interactions is very affecting. Despite the comedy that Keane’s exaggerated poetic language necessarily invokes, there remains at the heart of their communications a raw, abrasive nastiness. The character of Sive is less convincing: admittedly a rather flat and uninteresting character, her powerlessness and vulnerability aren’t really evoked so as to engender sympathy, and a misguided decision to have her climb and lie precariously on a high shelf of the set’s floor-to-ceiling cupboards merely highlighted the over-the-top nature of a structure that overshadowed and distracted from the onstage action (from the cheap seats, at least).
The whole of this production leans heavily on melodrama: the character of Seán Dóta, Sive’s betrothed, is so elderly and frail that it was as much as he could do to hobble feebly from chair to chair (I wondered how this debilitated creature could possibly have made a “drive” at Sive on the road). A play like this, drawing on the comic but ultimately resting as tragic, requires a fine and delicate balance – it’s one I’m not entirely convinced this production achieves. It is in its quieter moments, such as Nana’s and Mena’s scrapping, or Mike’s abject failure to display even a modicum of affection towards his wife, rather than its grandiose moments of tragedy, that this production truly resonates.
Thomasheen rather insightfully asks, “What do the like of us know about love?” and the fine way that the tension between love and the reality of life is played out in this production more than makes Hynes’ Sive worth a watch. If you’re looking to reprise your youth, to remember the halcyon days of essays that didn’t require extensive footnoting and bibliography, you could do worse than to go and see this production of Sive.
