theatre review

LES MISERABLES AT KILCULLEN


The Mischa Fekete directed all talking no singing version of Les Miserables opened to appreciative audiences and ran for more than a week in Kilcullen during April.
The show represented a personal triumph for Mr Fekete who had championed it , steered it, shaped it and moulded it, from inception through a long rehearsal period, right up to opening night and beyond.
He had done so against the express recommendations of sundry less inspired nay sayers including me.
I thought he was mad.
I still think he's mad.
I can't believe he got away with it.
The production involved a massive logistical effort with more than thirty performers on stage and as many again involved behind the scenes.
Mr Fekete's success with the show hinged in no small part on the array of talent he dragooned into participating.
I am thinking in particular of his executive producer Eilis Phillips who is something of a dragoon herself.
This was a show that fired on all cylinders.
I think it was also curiously enough the first time in thirty years that I've seen a play in Kilcullen or anywhere else, that was self consciously Christian.
Strange days indeed.
The lead role of a convict whose heart is softened by the charity of others was subtly handled by Donogh Noone.
Mr Noone neatly suggested the anger and physicality of a desperate man and then just as neatly conveyed the same man's spiritual transformation.
John Coleman as his heartless adversary the police man Javert, gave a typical John Coleman performance, one part unfathomable genius, three parts John Coleman.
The highpoint of his performance came just before intermission when he seemed to address the audience directly. His unholy cry of defiance, his rejection of God, his repudiation of humanity, sent a shiver down the spine. It was appalling to behold. Appalling and brilliant. With unerring instinctive playing, Mr Coleman never let it descend into melodrama.
He found a second high point close to the end of the play as his spiritual and moral adversary the former convict offered him the possibility of earthly redemption, and he brutally and insanely rejected it.
Again it could have been the most mordant of melodramas.
In Mr Coleman's hands it was something else.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Either John Coleman's an acting genius or he's just very very good at being himself on stage.
There was a restraint in his playing and a confidence in his villainy, that almost had the audience rooting for the baddy.
In the past I've labelled him the left ham of the devil.
This was unfair.
John Coleman could be a professional actor. He might even be a good one.
It's no longer my call.
Destiny will decide.
The actress Charlene Kilroy gave a nicely evoked portrayal of a young mother desperate to provide care for her child during the height of the Terror which followed the French Revolution.
She evinced quite a compelling death scene too, tugging at the heart strings but wisely choosing not to tug them so tightly that she might break them.
There were also some adroit performances from the supporting cast, particularly from Mary Clare McMahon, Tomas Tierney, Eileen O'Keeffe, Lisa Kennedy, Adam Treacey, and Lorna Moore.
Mr Fekete had drilled them well.
Among the other lesser roles there were a few stand out performances.
Siobhan Phillips was a gem as a lady like beyotch. Francie O'Brien gave a nuanced interpretation of a corrupt court witness. Orna Whyte was impishly dexterous in her portrayal of a street urchin and positively poigant in her depiction of that urchin in the grips of unrequited love.
Emer Mucke and Lorraine Clarke as best supporting urchins were similarly charmingly effective.
Mr Fekete had introduced a Billy Wilderish flavour to his version of Les Miserables by casting four of Kilcullen's most accomplished theatre directors in straight acting roles.
You will remember the Hollywood master director Billy Wilder did the same thing in Sunset Boulevard with minor roles for Cecil B DeMille and a coterie of silent movie era greats, to quite stunning effect.
Mr Fekete's relics of auld decency were Brigadier General John Martin, famous for his linear narrative directing style, Bernard Bernard, widely known for his comic showcases, Eilis Phillips who has a reputation as an all round theatrical wunderkind (as well as being a dragoon), and Mischa Fekete himself, up to now simply a director of spectacles.
It gave those of us in the know a particular thrill to see the four of these in acting roles together.
No longer the masters of all they survey.
Merely players.
It was fun to seem em so, I tells ee.
The resonance, the hidden authority if you will, of these four personages may not have been entirely lost on those not in the know either.
Of course the casting of these four directors in actors' roles finally provided indupitable evidence that each is a better director than an actor.
John Martin gave an unexciting unostentatious though gently effective display in his portrayal of the Bishop whose kindness to an embittered convict sets the ball rolling for the convict's cosmic change of heart and all that follows with it.
His Bishop was perhaps a tad too efficient. More emotion, more vulnerability might have helped.
Personally, when the dangerous escaped convict burst into the Bishop's parochial house, I was more worried for the safety of the convict.
At one point I had the feeling that Mr Martin was playing the Bishop as the best Brigadier General in the Catholic Church.
There is a rule in acting. Never act with children or animals. I add a codicil to this rule. Never act with candles.
Mr Martin's part required him to light a pair of candles during the course of his scene with the convict. On the night I attended the show, one candle steadfastly refused to be lit.
Mr Martin equally steadfastly and serenely and without breaking character, refused to let it stay unlit.
Most actors would have let the candle alone after the initial attempt to get it to submit.
But most actors haven't led a United Nations battle group in South Lebanon.
I got a good deal of wry amusement from my early and verifiably justified certitude that in this battle between actor and candle, the candle would eventually come out second best.
Forgive me gentle travellers of the internet.
I am a simple man and have few pleasures in life.
Watching Mr M insist to a wayward candle that it would indeed light up the stage, while at the same time he continued to play the scene both to the audience and his fellow thespians, was indeed a source of pure unalloyed joy to me.
Nuff said.
Bernard Berney's troubling and troubled depiction of the villain  who tries to blackmail the repentent convict (and anyone else who comes within reach) essayed a certain timbre of darkness without ever completely alienating fans of his more established comic persona.
Mr Fekete as director seemed to be reluctant to jettison Mr Berney's established persona as a comedian and I think because of this there remained a certain paradoxical inconsistentcy between the instincts of the actor and the intentions of his director.
The audience also seemed reluctant to accept him as an unrequited villain even when the on stage behaviour of his character was beyond abominable.
The audience's predisposition to the actor was one reason for this. Another reason was the humane insights into depravity which Mr Berney brought to his playing.
Eilis Phillips as a servant girl had a smidge more character than we have come to expect of 18th century servant girls. But you can't expect an actor to conceal all their talent on stage, so I suppose I mustn't complain.
Mr Fekete himself playing the narrator of events French author Victor Hugo, revelled in his role.
At opening curtain he pronounced with elan: "I am Victor Hugo."
You believed him. And the moment was peculiarly apposite for those of us who suspected quite how much of himself Mr Fekete had invested in this show.
His daughter Emer was performing on stage. His other daughter Tara was handling lights and sound effects.
In more ways than one Les Miserables was his babies.
I had been asked several months ago to take the role of Victor Hugo.
But when Mischa Fekete finally proclaimed: "I am Victor Hugo," on opening night, I had to take my hat off.
No one could have done it better.
There were some stand out scenes over the course of the two hours.
A chaotic courtroom stewarded by Judge Dick Dunphy and prosecutor Maurice O'Mahoney caught something of the horror of revolutionary justice.
Mr Dunphy, a living legend of acting in Kilcullen for five decades, seemed on this particular night to be straining at the bit to get at his audience. Truly has it been said (by me) you don't give Dick Dunphy a role. You turn him loose. Unfortunately this particular role limited him. He didn't have enough time to do what he does so well. It was a vignette. We needed more. Does one ask a Kilcullen Richard Burton to play the fool in Hamlet? Nay, nay and thrice nay. I would have swapped Dick Dunphy with John Martin as the Bishop, and let Mr Martin play the Judge as an army officer.
That piece of casting would have delivered. On all fronts, as we do say in the army.
Nonetheless the courtroom scene did stand out, thanks in no small part to the support players and in quite a large part to the malign manipulative invidiousness of Maurice O'Mahoney's prosecutor.
Mr O'Mahoney seemed to revel in the scurrilousness of the role, veritably rejoicing in the prosecutor's every scurrilous scurrility. Mr O'Mahony manifested all the riotous enjoyment of an actor at the top of his form playing villains who is in fact a thoroughgoing gentleman in real life.
The action of the play was also helped by the casting of a near perfect ingenue in the form of Mary Kiely.
The multi talented Miss Kiely has written as many plays as she's acted in. Still I'd hazard that at this moment in life, her real talent lies in doing what comparatively few actresses can do.
She can actually convince an audience for real that people are falling in love with her at first sight.
The famous American actress Diane Keaton could do it in her younger days on Broadway and in Woodie Allen films. Aine Byrne was the only other local actress I've seen succeed in a similar portrayal which she accomplished in a production of Charlie's Aunt ten years ago.
But this year's girl is Mary Kiely.
The quality of the ingenue, that quality of innocence and experience mixed with a genuine spiritual beauty, is extremely rare.
Lots of plays need an ingenue.
Very few really find one.
Most actresses have to wing it.
Mary Kiely was it.
Which brings us to the other find of the night.
A certain Mr Jack Scullion, a teenager, who played the young suitor of the ingenue.
One doesn't like to praise the young actors overmuch.
It's like praising a three year old for doing Irish dancing.
Yet if a young man turns in a performance of nuance, credibility, drama, passion and depth, and if he does with an artisty that is no less accomplished for being precocious, why then it would be churlish to pretend it didn't happen on account of age.
And although Churlish is my middle name, today it shall not be so.
Mr Scullion was extraordinary.
I hate to saddle anyone with a great potential but with everything else that was going on in this production, and quite a lot was going on, I'll suggest here and now that one day we may remember it merely as the coming to light of a true acting talent in the form of Mr Jack Scullion.
His ease on stage, his mastery of accent and intonation, his effortless realism in the midst of any number of incredible events, his generosity to his fellow actors, all combined to create a performance of marvellous impact.
Kilcullen's finest character actress Siobhan Patterson gave a performance of depth in her portrayal of the blackmailing villain Bernard Berney's wife.
Ms Patterson's acting comes laced with humour but she's not afraid to bring her audience somewhere dark.
Her playing put me in mind of the comic representations of Madame La Guillotine in Blackadder only without the pantomime touch.
Everything she did was orchestrated to the enth degree. It was fine playing.
Right at the end, as the revolution subsides and the dust settles on a half ruined city, she reemerges still intact, still blackmailing, creeping softly through the chaos of collapsing societies and ruined lives. Oh there was a knowingness in her performance that was strikingly eerie alright.
I'd given her an extra line on her final exit.
I'd have had her turn to the hero and say with malicious glee: "Fare thee well, au revoir."
But me and Victor Hugo (and indeed me and Mischa Fekete) have never agreed about my attempts to rewrite the classics, so the above comment shouldn't be taken as a criticism.
Les Miserables contains a sensation scene when the revolution erupts in the streets and we join the heroes on the barricades.
Mr Fekete and his daughter Tara Mucke, who was responsible for lighting and sound effects, overcame the limitations of a small theatre with an evocative demonstration of what can be achieved through insight, planning and a poetic sensibility.
I'd have preferred if the guns were actually discharged rather than mimed. And certainly we needed a loud gunshot when Donagh Noone as the hero appeared to be shooting the dastardly John Coleman.
The scene at barricades carried an intriguing resonance.
It's set in France in 1848 but I was seeing Ireland today.
In the past Ireland has avoided the absolute horrors of revolutionary Nazism and/or revolutionary Communism.
We have avoided them by the grace of the Lord through the influence of the Catholic Church.
Now an unwise generation of delinquent degenerates is seeking to repudiate Ireland's Christianity.
How will the next generations see themselves free of the revolutionary snares of Satan?
As I watched the barricades go up on the Kilcullen stage it seemed as if I was no longer watching a play.
I was watching a prophecy.
Another lesser sensation scene of a quite different hue, was the wedding dance, where we learnt that Kilcullen actors can still turn a hoof. The surprise wasn't that they did it. The surprise was that they did it so well. Personally I just wouldn't have let them do it for so long.
Other performances that caught my eye on the night came from Caitriona Poufong as an austere nun, Ross Townsend as an American accented prisoner, Philomena Droney as a snobbish aunt, and Nessa Dunlea as a most shrewish factory foreman.
Les Miserables is one of those plays where the costumes can really make or break the show.
I am told that Philomena Droney was responsible for the design and acquisition of the costumes. She was thus a key figure in engineering the production's authentic and eyecatching visual appeal.
Her costuming for John Coleman as the police officer was an implicit part of the success of that character.
The montage scene at the end with the entire cast on stage looked as good as anything in the London West End version.
I couldn't help feeling that Mischa Fekete's triumph with this production was in a very real way, also Miss Droney's.
Well folks.
I thought Mischa Fekete was nuts to put on an all talking no singing version of Les Miserables in the country theatre of a small town called Kilcullen.
He has proved me wrong.
In doing so he has revitalised our local Drama Group, given a new telling of an old classic, and reiterated in a non self conscious way the eternal truths of the Christian faith.
Thank you Mr Fekete.

Das war sehr schon.