STONES IN HIS POCKETS: Marie Jones
New Ambassadors
Tkts: 020 7369 1761
Runs: 2hrs 15m: one interval.
7.30pm, Thurs & Sat matinee 3.30pm.
Review: Kim Durham: 22nd July 2003
Still an immensely engaging production with much to enjoy two versatile performers and a script as telling as it is funny If anything Stones in his Pockets plays with greater impact on its return to the New Ambassadors than it did when it first opened in this venue. Three years on the tale of a Hollywood produced film shooting in a County Kerry village, as seen through the eyes of two extras, has an increased resonance.
Marie Jones' brilliantly conceived and very funny comic two-hander has at its heart a love/hate relationship. Charlie and Jake are both infatuated with the America that feeds their dreams, and increasingly bitter at the reality of the foreign power that carelessly exploits both them and the village. It is a deep and powerful ambivalence that we have become increasingly aware fuels much of the world besides the West of Ireland.
Jake, the dourer of the two, and already disillusioned by a failed emigration to New York, is the first to recognize that each has simply been hired as a background bogman, a bit of ethnic colour. At one point, despite a tragedy striking the community, they are cajoled into a display of cheerfully choreographed Oirishy, literally into dancing to the filmmaker's tune. It is a moment that, like much of the richest comedy, is both hilarious and painful.
As well as playing Charlie and Jake, the cast of two - Rupert Degas and Hugh Lee - also take on other members of the village and the film crew. This is an arrangement that undoubtedly delights the theatre management. It is also one of the chief pleasures of Ian McElhinney's fast-moving production.
The economy with which each actor switches role a turn of the body, a shift of position is matched by telling detail in the playing. In both the writing and the performances, there is sly subtlety in the characterization. Screen queen, Caroline Giovanni, in Degas' wickedly observed portrayal, may be crassly manipulative and patronizing with the locals, but she is not simply a caricature of a culturally dumb Hollywood superstar. She has certainly done enough homework to recognize a Seamus Heaney poem when she hears one.
Still there is plenty of anger behind Marie Jones' comic writing, an emotion only partially lifted by the slightly imposed optimism of the ending.
Cast: Rupert Degas, Hugh Lee
(Alternate Cast: Martin Jenkins. Jean-Paul Van Cauwelaert)
Director: Ian McElhinney
Designer: Jack Kirwan
Lighting: Graham McLusky
Rod Dungate's review of the earlier tour is in our Archive.
2003-07-23 08:57:52