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Theatre Review: The Cambria

Starring Donal O’Kelly and Sorcha Fox at the Irish Arts Center, New York, NY

By
CAHIR O'DOHERTY,
IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 2:12 PM
Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 5:23 PM

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Donal O'Kelly and Sorcha Fox star in the Irish Arts Center "The Cambria"
Donal O'Kelly and Sorcha Fox star in the Irish Arts Center "The Cambria"
Photo by Erin Baiano

With his new play "The Cambria" at the Irish Arts Center in New York having concluded its run on Sunday, playwright and actor Donal O’Kelly steps to the front line of contemporary Irish playwrights. In fact, in terms of the play’s theatrical skill and thematic ambition, he already has his contemporaries beat. 

O’Kelly’s subtle and moving play about the African-American ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ voyage to Ireland in 1845, co-starring Sorcha Fox, could easily have been a deadly dull sermon about the need to protect universal human rights.  But in O’Kelly’s hands it instead becomes an absorbing meditation on what makes us human, what connects us to each other and what tears us apart.

The production, directed by Raymond Keane, is nimble and evocative, conjuring a ship on the open seas and all the male and female passengers who populate it. Fox is especially good at these transformations between roles, playing male and female charachters so convincingly that you’ll be swept up by the storyline from start to finish.

The play’s plot is as interesting as its theatrical presentation. The year is 1845, and the 30-year-old famed abolitionist Douglass is sailing for Europe aboard a ship called the Cambria, fleeing the hostile forces in the United States determined to halt his call for the end of slavery in the southern states.

A former slave himself, Douglass knew the fate that awaited him in America and decided to take his abolitionist message to Europe to enlist its help.  

Visiting Ireland for the first time, he was astonished to receive a hero’s welcome from vast crowds of sympathetic, long-suffering Irish Catholics familiar with his career and his recently published autobiography.  The Irish liberator Daniel O’Connell himself arrives in Cork — then known as Queenstown — to welcome Douglass at the dock. 

O’Kelly is aware of the potent overlaps between racial and colonial oppression, but he does not belabor his points.  Instead he simply lets them emerge to often devastating theatrical effect. 

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See more: irish entertainment, ireland entertainment, irish theatre, irish plays

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