I'LL BE THE DEVIL. To 8 March.
London.
I’LL BE THE DEVIL
by Leo Butler.
Tricycle Theatre To 8 March 2008.
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 4pm & 5 March 2pm.
Captioned 6 March.
Runs 1hr 45min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7328 1000.
www.rsc.org.uk/london
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 February.
Dark intensity in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first Tricycle offering.
Doubtless the Enlightenment was spreading reason and tolerance across Europe by 1762, but not in the Limerick of Leo Butler’s play. It’s a grey world, only the scarlet of the English military providing any colour. Cold shafts of light barely pierce the semi-visible surrounds, creating a bleakness amplified by Fergus O’Hare’s soundscape of howling winds and dripping rain.
Hovel and pillory are understandably rough and incomplete-seeming. Yet designer Lizzie Clachan makes even the soldier’s pub look sparse and chilly, its sole décor a distant picture of George III. It’s here the soldiery torment a ragged young Catholic who claims he wants to help them.
Officers watch over their men’s viciousness, while Gerard Murphy’s thuggish Sergeant mixes cruel humour with physical menace, determinedly finding offence in any response.
Ramin Gray’s bleak production matches Butler’s elusive, edgy, ironic writing. As the army’s main function is oppressing, punishing and expropriating Papists, Lieutenant Coyle (Eoin McCarty, travelling through desperation’s urgent, withdrawn and resigned phases) faces severe danger, having a foot in both camps. He’s Irish, like many another soldier the British were forced to deploy back home as war with France stretched manpower. But he’s kept a liaison with local Catholic “witch” Maryanne, endangering them, and their two near-adult children. In return, she taunts him furiously, while the youngsters’ simple, unrelenting attachment brings disaster.
John McEnery’s irony-loaded English Colonel introduces a sense of order, as he sits in the home expropriated from Maryanne’s family, then challenges her in her own dwelling where he brings retribution (better a peasant suffer than a soldier) followed by a verbal war of nerves. McEnery and Derbhle Crotty play this with finely-shaded concentration, like slow-motion tennis with bomb instead of ball.
Framing the action are the only scenes with any tenderness, set, Edward Bond-like, against the cruelty of blinded Dermot in a pillory. Butler presents remorseless extremes (especially with this billed as a “response” to The Tempest). He doesn’t argue political cases but offers (Bond-like again) scenes of ethnic conflict across a divide it’s fatal to bestride. And does so with a force enhanced by the RSC’s fine cast.
Dermot: Tom Burke.
Corporal O’Connor: Billy Carter.
Maryanne: Derbhle Crotty.
Lance-Corporal Finnigan: Colm Gormley.
Captain Skelton: J D Kelleher.
Lieutenant Ryan: Andrew Macklin.
Captain Farrell: Edward Macliam.
Lieutenant Coyle: Eoin McCarty.
Colonel Fleming: John McEnery.
Sergeant Browne: Gerard Murphy.
Pot-boy: David Toole.
Ellen: Samantha Young.
Harp/Bagpipes: Dirk Campbell.
Fiddle/Bagpipes: Giles Lewin.
Percussion: John Blease.
Director: Ramin Gray.
Designer: Lizzie Clachan.
Lighting: Charles Balfour.
Sound: Fergus O’Hare.
Music: Peter Cowdrey.
Movement: Anna Morrissey
Voice coach: Edda Sharpe.
Fights: Philip D’Orleans.
Assistant director: Jonathan Humphreys.
2008-02-29 14:09:24