The Out to Lunch 20th anniversary festival has already had some star turns, notably the Donegal country blues singer Muireann Bradley who wowed a packed house at the Black Box at the weekend. The same energy levels weren’t felt in actor and comedian Terry O’Neill’s account of James Joyce’s 1905 short story Grace. One of the tales in The Dubliners, it is, according to one critic “as subversive as any Dubliners contains” and one which the Catholic church should have fulminated against. It’s promising material, with Tom Kernan drinking and falling, both senses, at the start. He’s scooped up by a friend, one of a clutch of characters who try to redeem him and end up as minor figures in Ulysses. But we were being read at rather than carried along on the brilliant characterisation of Mr Joyce.
There are comic moments, to do with drinking, also the droll figure of Mrs Kernan, whose patience has worn thin as her disapproval of her husband, initially glamorous with his silk hat and lavender trousers, has increased.
O’Neill is good at portraying her and also some of the exchanges when the friends gather at Kernan’s bedroom, with its personal odour, to work out a plan. The Dublin accents are well differentiated here. Kernan insists they’re all scoundrels but they intend going with him on a religious retreat, hoping to cure the convert of his lax ways. But this three-part story has a bit of a sting in the tale and unpicks Catholic orthodoxy in the men’s casual conversation about Papal infallibility and other theological points, featuring priests who could generations later have graced a Father Ted script.
After some stout and whiskey and more discussion, we encounter the men entering a Jesuit church to be preached to by a priest styling himself their spiritual accountant” and using his understanding of Mammon to present a kind of businesslike God. The grace to be found here isn’t much to do with the Holy Spirit after all. O’Neill set the scene at times, with a certain enthusiasm barring a couple of slip-ups, but the Bewley Theatre Café production wasn’t as thrillingly Joycean as one might have hoped although the audience overall seemed to enjoy the narrative.
Jane Hardy
