MOLLY SWEENEY. To 23 December.

Glasgow

MOLLY SWEENEY
by Brian Friel

Citizens Theatre (Circle Studio) To 23 December 2005
Tue-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS: 0141 429 0022
www.citz.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 December

Insightful play in visionary production.
Brian Friel's story of Molly, almost totally blind from babyhood, is a kind of Pygmalion. Surgeon Rice restores her sight temporarily, with self-interested motives, to give his mediocre career a moment equalling eminent colleagues and recovering a self-esteem shattered into alcoholic self-pity by his wife leaving him. His temporary success removes Molly from her happily fulfilled life wihout sight, while never placing her fully in the sighted world.

Friel shows his 3 characters' different perspectives through a script largely proceeding in monologues recalling past events. It's a form fitting the action, but one generally deadly for theatre-in-the-round. Yet Gregory Thompson's production uses it to advantage, Rice's confessions, Molly's intelligence and her husband Frank's enthusiasm bouncing round the 4 banks of spectators, who become involved closely with these people, being treated as party-guests and friends when appropriate.

Stuart Jenkins' light aptly opens each act in darkness, at other times directing shafts of light at Molly as subject for study or providing moments of colour in her happiness. The action talkes place partly beneath designer Ellen Cairns' branches of glass fragments, an image of sight as something less than a whole vision of life.

Cara Kelly, always an alert, resourceful performer, seizes the opportunities this central role gives. Except when she's being perceived by Rice she never appears unsighted in facial expression or movement; Molly has a full, intelligent and emotionally-satisfying life, from happily learning her way round the family garden as a child to her work and social life. Kelly's excellent with all this, as with the perplexities sighted experience brings.

Christopher Dunne seems to be forever apologising - the play is more a confession in the narrow sense for him than for the others. And Michael Glenn Murphy makes Molly's husband an appealing mix of enthusiasm and vulnerability, from the early courtship through accounts of his failed business attempts to his perpetual keenness to help Molly. Smiling, speaking in energetic bursts, never unkind about anyone, nor fazed for long by life's problems, Murphy achieves the difficult job of making an entirely benevolent character sympathetic without appearing asinine.

This is easily the finest of the 4 British Friel productions I've seen this year,and an essential example of the Citizens' in top, fresh-thinking form.

Molly: Cara Kelly
Frank: Michael Glenn Murphy
Mr Rice: Christopher Dunne

Director: Gregory Thompson
Designer: Ellen Cairns
Lighting: Stuart Jenkins
Movement: Jane Howie

2005-12-18 15:44:41