Midden, Traverse Theatre
If you're Irish, come into the kitchen
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Your support makes all the difference."It's funny how all our memories of childhood are actually memories of America,'' says a character in Midden. She and her friend and her sister have just, jokingly, struck up the theme tune of their favourite programme, Charlie's Angels, and assumed the famous position. This rather self-conscious observation suggests what is wrong with Morna Regan's first play. Watching it is like seeing one's memory unspool all the Irish kitchen-sink dramas of the past 20 years.
Midden examines the emotional domestic refuse of the Sweeney women of Derry City. Widowed Ma lives with her younger daughter, Aileen, and her own mother, Dophie, who drifts from past to present, from whimpering to feistiness. Ma and Aileen are feisty all the time, as is Ruth, the older sister, who has just returned after 10 years in America. Ruth's friend and business partner, Mab, loud, profane, and with a well-whipped husband, out-feists them all, swaggering even when sitting down. Her schoolmates, she says, laughed at her and said she was thick. "But here we are, Ruthy, top of the pile, and they can all go kiss my big hairy hole.''
Improbably successful as a fashion designer for "high-society ladies'' (she seems to have derived her idea of "casual chic'' from the Littlewood's catalogue), Ruth has transferred her business back to Derry.
She and Mab are preparing for the launch, which will have "a red carpet and the paparazzi and the international press'' (one wonders what exactly is in her cigarettes). But Ruth's real business is to take up her quarrel with her mother at the point where she left it 10 years before: Why didn't Ma help her open a dressmaking shop so she could have stayed at home?
Ruth's resentment at having been forced to become wealthy and successful is Regan's one original contribution to this genre. Repeatedly Ruth berates her mother for having "shovelled'' her out the door, ladling on the misery she has endured across the water. She has eaten such heathen fabrications as guacamole. There is a great dearth of old men in flat caps. Worst of all, she was actually engaged to a native. Well, thank goodness she broke that off (though the bastard will keep sending her orchids).
In Ma's relationship with Dophie, however, lies a much more believable and gripping story, one that explains why the younger woman's tenderness toward her mother is spiked with malice. Unfortunately, the writing, Lynne Parker's badly paced direction, and Ruth Hegarty's monotonous Ma, bury a poignant revelation in a long, strident soliloquy.
Pauline Hutton is appealing in the part of the jokey kid sister, but one soon tires of Kathy Downes's whiny Ruth and Maggie Hayes's crass Mab. The best performance is that of Barbara Adair, who never condescends to us or to Dophie, with her sensitive portrait of this pitiable sow who has eaten her own farrow.
Traverse Theatre (0131-228 1404) to 23 Aug, 19.45 (22.00) 10.30 (12.45)
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