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The Review - THEATRE by DAN FRANKLIN
Published: 13 November 2008

Bryan Murray (Jack Farrell) makes his point to Eamonn Hunt (George Kelly)

Cabbies’ last stand

REVIEW: RANK
Tricycle Theatre

CARL Conway (Alan King) has problems. He’s overweight, suffering from a gambling addiction and he’s heavily in debt to a pair of father and son gangsters.
Fishamble’s production of Rank enjoyed a successful run at the Dublin Theatre Festival this year and the Tricycle is hosting the Irish company’s British premiere.
Carl is a cabbie who spends much of his day at the holding area for taxis at Dublin City airport waiting to be called to the main rank at the terminal building.
It’s a fitting setting for a character who has been whiling his life away since his wife died indulging his greed in all its forms. But Jack Farrell (Bryan Murray) and his dopey son Fred (Luke Griffin) have grown tired of waiting for the money he owes them and give him until the evening to cough up the €3,000 he owes them at their casino.
He enlists fellow cab driver and father-in-law George Kelly (Eamonn Hunt) and the affable “Two in the Bush” (John Lynn, because he’s “always got a bird in his hands”) to make things right with the Farrells.
The play is at its best when it is at its lightest.
The characters’ patter is bright and witty: whether it’s Jack recounting how he recruited a stammering phone sex operator, or George explaining how he stockpiled a lifetime’s worth of toilet roll when it was on a particularly good discount.
All the performances are solid, and Lynn’s particularly good, if only because he is gifted a majority share of the one-liners. But while it works well as likeable, bantering comedy it falls down in its attempts to thrill. When Jack sends the cabbies off to recover a hold-all for him after a failed bank heist as a get-out of repaying him, what is already a tired, familiar scenario becomes mired in lengthy, expository dialogue.
Much of the potential dramatic tension ebbs away in a nonchalant manner, and the plea bargaining is not particularly convincing. The breaking of the uneasy peace between George and Jack could have been explosive but proves a damp squib.
Robert Massey’s characters could have done with less soul-searching and more with shredding our nerves.
Until November 29
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