Theatre in Review: Da (Irish Repertory Theatre)

	Paul O'Brien and Ciarán O'Reilly. Photo: Carol Rosegg

Today's topic is the care and feeding of yesterday's blockbusters. I don't mean classics: Romeo and Juliet will survive, no matter what directors do to it. I'm talking about those hits that, now past the first flush of youth, need a little help getting up on the stage. Consider Da: Hugh Leonard's tartly comic family memoir ran just short of 700 performances in 1978. A national tour followed, along with many subsequent regional productions and a film. It provided Barnard Hughes, long one of Broadway's reliable character men, with the role of a lifetime. I saw him in the national tour, with the peerless Helen Stenborg (Mrs. Hughes), playing his gimlet-eyed wife, and his daughter Laura, in the small role of Mary Tate. As Da himself might say, it was a grand performance in a grand play.

Thirty-seven years on, however, Da doesn't look nearly as nimble as it once did. To be sure, it still has its felicities. Leonard conceived a clever, time-bending framework to tell the story of Charlie, a middle-aged playwright of some success, who has returned to Dublin for his father's funeral. The services are over, the priest has been thanked, the mourners have enjoyed their bottles of stout. Charlie has just a few more papers to go through and he will be free to return home -- to his family, his career, and the delights of life in London.

Except that the old duffer won't go away. Ten minutes into the first act, he is back, puttering around the kitchen, once again burning his hand on an "anti-Christ of a tea kettle," despite having been warned about it a hundred times, filling his pipe, and unfailingly getting on his son's nerves. Looking at the fiftyish Charlie, he says, "Begod son, you're getting as grey as a badger." It's not long before Charlie is joined by others from long ago, including his long-dead mother and his adolescent self, acting out the most mortifying scenes of his youth. "Old faces," he says. "They turn up like bills you never thought you'd have to pay."

And as Leonard makes clear in scene after scene, the passing of his Da has left behind any number of emotional bills that will not, cannot, never could be paid. We see the sullen Charlie chafing as his mother once again tells a visitor the story of how he was adopted, a narrative that stars herself as the patron saint of self-sacrifice. We see him shrinking from his -- from his jokes and bromides, his willingness to cringe before his social betters, his satisfaction with a life as constrained as the tiny kitchen where he sits and reads the newspaper at the end of another long day of work.

Charlie dreams of another kind of life, one with literature in it, but his parents get him a job as a filing clerk, which he toils at for 13 years before he finally breaks free. In the meantime, he is a stranger in his own house. He cringes when Da tells a visitor that once the war is over and Hitler is in charge of England, all will be well. When Charlie tries to make time with the all-too-willing Mary Tate, aka the Yellow Peril, his progress is interrupted by Da's appearance; after five minutes of Da asking after Mary's relatives, the romance is over. "The last thing I wanted that evening was a person," Charlie says regretfully. Later, when Da retires after working for nearly 60 years as a gardener for "a family of quality," Charlie is furious to see him accept, without complaint, a tiny pension and a lump sum of a mere 25 pounds, along with a bizarre family heirloom, a mass of spectacles found fused together in the ruins of the San Francisco earthquake.

Charlie finally escapes to London, happy to be free and ashamed to be so happy. Yet later, when he sends his widowed Da money for little treats, the old man spends none of it; when Charlie puts the failing Da into a private hotel, the old man rails about being put into a home. Between them, the simple act of giving and receiving love is forever frustrated.

It's a powerful dilemma, one that many in the audience will recognize. And Leonard had a golden ear for dialogue; the script is full of salty, cantankerous observations that can only be called quintessentially Irish. Charlie, remembering his attempts at success with the ladies, says, "All I seemed to get was the kind of girl who had a special dispensation from Rome to wear the thickest part of her legs beneath her knees." When Charlie informs a long-lost friend that his Da was always fond of him, Da grumbles, "Fond of that one? Jesus, will you give over, my grave's too narrow to turn in." Drumm, the bitterly snobbish chief clerk who acts as Charlie's other father figure, muses, "In seventy years, the one surviving fragment of my knowledge, the only indisputable poor particle of certainty in my entire life, is that in a public house lavatory incoming traffic has the right of way." And in a line that could haunt you for a lifetime, Charlie sadly admits, "It was a long time before I realized that love turned upside down was love, for all of that."

Still, seen today, what is now evident is that Da is extremely loosely structured, a scrapbook of scenes detailing Charlie's grievances and the hold the past still has over him. Most glaringly, the play lacks a proper ending; it concludes more or less where it began, with Charlie still being haunted by Da. Death offers no freedom; father and son are forever yoked in dissatisfaction.

Given the right handling, however, I believe Da can still present an indelible portrait of a man who can neither revere nor dismiss the memory of his parents and therefore remains a hostage to the past. Sadly, the proof cannot be found in Charlotte Moore's production, which often misses the music in Leonard's words. At the heart of the play is a knot of conflicting -- obligation, fury, and love deferred. But Moore lets the cast rush through the scenes, skimming across the surface and missing the deeper, more complicated feelings underneath. This is especially evident in the climactic scene, in which Charlie discovers Da's surprising legacy, which, in its way, sums up all that never happened between them.

The production also suffers from the miscasting of Paul O'Brien as Da; the actor seems too contemporary and too polished to play a man so simple that, Charlie says, you could "throw him a crumb and he would call it a banquet." Similarly, Fiana Toibin's Mother isn't a convincing portrait of a woman whose soul has been soured by missed romance and a life of scraping by on a few shillings a week; an essential hardness, bred by years of deprivation, is missing. Also, Sean Gormley's Drumm could use a strong infusion of acid; he doesn't fully convey the stoicism and overweening pride of a man who considers everyone he meets to be beneath his attention.

On the plus side, Ciarán O'Reilly's Charlie is amusingly irascible when dueling with Da, and appealingly rueful in repose, as he watches his past unfold with a mixture of nostalgia and dismay. It's a role he was born to play. Adam Petherbridge neatly captures the festering anger and dissatisfaction of the young Charlie. And there are nice contributions from John Keating as Oliver, Charlie's feckless best friend; Kristin Griffith as the patronizing daughter of Da's late employer, and Nicola Murphy as Mary, the Yellow Peril.

The rest of the production, including James Morgan's cramped kitchen setting; Michael Gottlieb's sensitive, lavender-tinged lighting; Linda Fisher's costumes; and Zach Williamson's sound, is fine.

Still, one leaves the theatre with the nagging feeling that a play of a certain quality has not been given the opportunity to transcend its very real weaknesses. After all these years, doesn't an old man and his play deserve a little help?--David Barbour