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The Review - THEATRE by TOM FOOT
Published: 13 September 2007

Ireland World Cup tale is a knockout

THE PRIDE OF PARNELL STREET
Tricycle Theatre

THERE was a lot of rumbling coming from the stomachs of the audience at the Tricycle Theatre on Monday night.
It is the trouble with 8pm starts – everyone has enough time to eat a proper dinner, but not to digest it.
This gloomy tale, from the award-winning Irish playwright Sebastian Barry, growls from the underbelly of modern-day Dublin.
Janet (Mary Murray) starts her story in 1990. The Republic of Ireland football team had made the quarter-finals of the World Cup. She talks of the euphoria in the streets and how, when Ireland were eliminated, the men returned home to their wives – to beat them.
“They all realised they were losers too,” she says at the end of her first 15-minute monologue. The light fades above her head and another comes on revealing the battered face of her husband Joe (Karl Shields). Like the Grim Reaper, he tells his story of heroin addiction, disease, petty crime and violence.
Cheery stuff, then, that is hard to recommend.
There was a woman standing at the entrance on the way in who offered to sell me her ticket – but I left feeling she had missed out. This play is performed with great skill. To stand up and perform a series of gruelling monologues like that and hold the audience is no mean feat.
There are underlying themes of importance of the family in Irish culture and the erosion of the values of former- Taoiseach Eamon de Valera. There are in-house jokes complemented by authentic colloquialism that struck a chord with the Irish members of the audience. What other theatre would put on a play like this but the Tricycle?
Gut-wrenching, but well-worth digesting.
Until September 22
020 7328 1000

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