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Pride in the Name of Barry


Published Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 4:09 PM
Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 6:09 PM

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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.

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