Improbable Frequency

Rough Magic Company

Theaters, New York

There's more skill and invention on display in the first act of the brilliant new musical Improbable Frequency than you'll see in a whole season of standard Broadway fare. The show, which is presented by Dublin's celebrated Rough Magic Company, opened on Sunday at the 59East59 Theaters off Park Avenue. The plot is pure hokum, but it explores a very serious theme - the Irish Republic's controversial neutrality during World War II. We're all familiar with the justifications Eamon de Valera's government gave for sitting on its hands during what they called, with laughable restraint, the Emergency - failing to take sides was a way of affirming Ireland's national sovereignty, after all - because England's wars were no longer automatically Ireland's. But how do remain neutral about the threat of Nazism? There's a lot of humor to be found in such fraught situations and playwright and lyricist Arthur Riordan (one of the original founding members of Rough Magic back in the mid-eighties) has a gift for exposing empty political platitudes with whip smart satire. It's a fact that during World War II the British government set crosswords in newspapers as a recruiting tool for potential code breakers. Once a gifted crossword player sent in the correct answer to claim a prize they were surprised to find themselves being recruited by the British Secret Service, called MI5, to tackle cryptic transmissions from the Nazis. Riordan's musical play riffs on a similar incident that happened in Ireland, which was reveled when MI5's files were finally made public in 2000. At the time the Secret Service suspected that an Irish radio request show had come under suspicion for songs that made reference to the weather - were the Irish giving the Nazis secret weather forecasts, the better to plan invasions? It seems fantastic now that such considerations were made at all, but during the Emergency Irish radio was forbidden from broadcasting the weather at all. In order to uphold Irish neutrality weather forecasts were censored, to the point that you couldn't even hint at local conditions in otherwise perfectly innocent broadcasts. Into this already ripe mix Riordan introduces the Irish master of postmodern surrealism Myles na gCopaleen, played sardonically by the pitch perfect Darragh Kelly, and the poet laureate of middle England John Betjemen, the British poet resident in Ireland and suspected of being a low level spy. One other delicious and little known aspect of life in the Republic during the so-called Emergency was the establishment of a small cafe for Nazi sympathizers in Dublin's D'Olier Street called the Red Bank Restaurant. Riordan has terrific fun satirizing its oddball frequenters, who in this case are outnumbered by the spies and stool pigeons in their midst, waiting for the first chance to imprison them. Improbable Frequency is playing at Street Theaters, 59 East 59th Street in New York, until January 4. Visit www59e59.org for information.