O Go My Man, Royal Court Downstairs, London
To be a Celtic tiger you need claws
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Your support makes all the difference.The surprise is that Feehily seems half-inclined to write a sitcom with surreal flashes. Sarah staggers around in a panto Cheshire Cat outfit and, in one hallucinatory mock-vengeance vignette, mimes gunning down a nasty ad director. The overall result is curiously uneven: sporadically startling and funny, elsewhere feeble and borrowing ideas from Patrick Marber, Neil LaBute or Mark Ravenhill.
Fierce moments surface in the private bust-ups, which feel autobiographically informed, tender and acidic. However, the games played with art and life are hardly up there with Pirandello or satirically on a par with Extras. O Go My Man raises, yet never really tackles, big ethical questions about Ireland's tiger economy, Third World news coverage and media exposés. The issue of individuals sliding between passionate commitment, compromise and selling-out, likewise, comes too rarely into focus.
Its director Max Stafford-Clark is acclaimed for his work with new playwrights, but this piece feels baggy and stylistically out of joint. The rapid-fire delivery of lines, early on, is tiresomely unnatural and Feehily actually has more of an ear for colloquial talk than this conveys. Hickey and Stewart seem almost too rushed to exude real pain and addictiveness. Still, Lynch is compulsive viewing and very droll as she drags herself inelegantly into her fishnets.
Commendations are also due to Es Devlin, whose set - a room mocked-up in plywood with sliding panels - has a mutability reflecting the characters' lives and a quiet sense of loss, with the furnishings of previous scenes leaving their ghostly outlines in gaffer tape. Essentially, however, Feehily is a fledgling writer not ready for this mainhouse exposure. The Court's 50th anniversary fare will surely improve or, for now, check out the readings of vintage hits in the Theatre Upstairs.
To 11 February (020 7565 5000), then touring
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