Brian Foster’s acclaimed play Myra’s Story makes you laugh, almost cry and it makes you think. We’ve all passed by homeless people on the street, given a pound or so and moved on. Yet here is the backstory of the human being beside you. This story of a homeless, middle aged female alcoholic, which arrived at the Grand Opera House this week, really shouldn’t be funny yet it is from the moment Fionna Hewitt-Twamley burps her way into character on the park bench. Her observations of other characters, and there are nearly a dozen onstage acted by her, are entertaining like Big Bernie with her permanent Woodbine on her lower lip married to the Tadpole.
But we start at the tough beginning after witnessing Myra ignored by the Dublin crowd intent on its own life. She puts out her tongue, scratches, treats the meanness with derision but the point is made. The big theme from then on, apart from addiction, is loss. Myra lost her mother at five in an accident with a Christmas tree and her father was absent due to drinking, his nemesis otherwise known as ‘the beast’. In fact, on his deathbed he implores her to resist the demon drink, which she promises but can’t of course deliver. The loss continues in the second half in a harrowing sequence. Myra has had a baby boy, Daniel, and we were treated to touching renditions of Danny Boy as she cradled him. You sense the happiness cannot last as a son would surely have saved Myra from her destitution. So it turns out, with a cot death touchingly acted, with the young mother not wanting to leave the lifeless baby. In similar vein, she hadn’t left her mother’s corpse, until forced. These are the sections that almost lead to tears.
At one point, Myra declares ‘My broken world is your broken world’. and she is right. Until everybody has a bed and a place to be and help conquering their beast, whatever it is, society isn’t whole. Yet Myra McClaughlin’s spirit remains as she reaches for her medicine and castigates an uncaring world.
Foster is a clever writer and manages to weave in the Troubles, seen from the perspective of the South worried they would travel down, and a depiction of Bloody Sunday as experienced by Myra’s young husband. This was spare yet frightening. But what marks Myra’s Story out, apart from some slightly contrived moments, is the main character and her monologue with its poetry of pain and dark humour. This is something Irish playwrights, from O’Casey to Beckett, do rather well.
Jane Hardy
