The Pride of Parnell Street

By Sebastian Barry

Review by Cahir O'Doherty

THE past, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. In Irish playwright Sebastian Barry's brilliant new play, The Pride of Parnell Street, he explores a time and place that now seems as lost to history as Atlantis - pre-Celtic Tiger Dublin.

In the new play Barry explores with vivid tenderness the lives and loves of two working class Dubliners who live on the margins of all the cultural changes they see around them, gawking at all the dramatic transformations long before they feel their effects.

For a writer with a rarified background - his name, after all, conjures doilies and cricket - it must have been a bit of a gamble. His efforts could have resulted in an over-earnest docudrama or a piece of patronizing reportage, but Barry emerges with a literally breathtaking script that's laced with irony and terrific humor, as his two characters Janet and Joe, recount the details of a great love torn asunder by violence.

The cumulative power of the script, which begins quietly and builds, eventually hits the audience with the force of an avalanche. This is artistry of a kind we have not seen from an Irish playwright in years.

New Haven's Arts and Ideas Festival were the first to identify its strength and give it a run at the Long Wharf Theatre last week, and it's no surprise to learn that it will transfer to New York for a run in 2009.

Barry wisely sets his play in September 1999, placing it right on the tail of the new millennium, the best vantage point to see the changes that have altered the lives of inner city Dubs Janet (Mary Murray) and Joe (Karl Shiels).

Miraculously, he's been gifted with a talented director and cast that equal the text. Director Jim Culleton's lucid direction plays to every strength of his accomplished cast and script, and Murray and Shiels are terrific as the two inner city kids surviving on their wits.

Although the story they tell is so sad it lingers with you for days, it's told so beguilingly that you'll be entranced from start to finish. Janet and Joe, teenage sweethearts, had a marriage that ultimately collapsed after a violent domestic attack and pressure put on their relationship by the death of their eldest son.

Barry uses interconnected monologues to bring Janet and Joe to life, and you will marvel at his skill in creating characters and themes that complement each other so effortlessly. Ireland's elimination from the World Cup, Italia '90, prompts Joe to commit a random act of violence that tears the couple apart.

"When the Irish team lost, they realized they were losers too," Janet tells us, speaking about all the sad sack men in her inner city world. She bares the brunt of Joe's frustration when he attacks her, ending their relationship and leading to the separate monologues that shape the play.

Neither has seen the other, we discover, since the night of that final match, the night he snapped.

It's a tribute to the script and the actors' immensely strong performances - the 100 minute play is performed without an interval - that we never once lose our sympathy for either player. The final scenes, where they encounter each other again for the first time in years, are so moving that you'll strain to catch every word said between them.

This isn't the colorful and ultimately embarrassingly one-dimensional world of Sean O'Casey's heart of gold Dubs. Barry' achievement in The Pride of Parnell Street is much finer. He has given us the most evocative celebration of the city and its inner city denizens since James Joyce's Leopold Bloom took a walk on June 16, 1904.

A hymn to the fragility of love, and to its towering strength, by the time the play concludes there's no question that you've just witnessed a major work by the most accomplished Irish playwright of his generation. It's an unmissable work and, assuming it retains its current director and accomplished cast, you can expect it to sweep all before it when it plays in New York next year.