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by Marie Jones, directed by Ian McElhinney

Mirvish Productions, Winter Garden Theatre, Toronto

January 9-February 25, 2001

"Precious Stones"

“Stones in His Pockets” is a show no lover of theatre should miss.  The simplicity of its staging and its complete emphasis on the acting abilities of its two cast members is a healthy restorative for those fed up with the over-produced musicals and plays one finds on Broadway or at Stratford.  The show gives the lie to those who think that the “magic of the theatre” has something to do falling chandeliers or descending helicopters.  This play shows that the real “magic of the theatre” can occur on an empty stage with minimal props and with just two talented actors who become the medium between the playwright’s story and our imagination.

The play premiered at Dublin's Lyric Theatre in 1999, was a hit at the Edinburgh Festival and has been the best-selling play in London's West End since it opened there nine months ago.  The Mirvishes have scored a coup by bringing Toronto the original Dublin and West End cast.  In fact, this must be the first time a show playing in Toronto has received Olivier Award nominations back in Britain—a Best Actor nomination for both actors and a nomination for Best Comedy. 

The immediate target of the play is the arrogance of the Hollywood film industry.  A film crew takes over a village in County Kerry to shoot a period epic “The Quiet Valley” with two supposedly famous American stars as the leads.  Everyone in the village has been recruited as an extra at £40 a day to supply local colour.  The locals regard the crew with a mixture of envy and resentment which reach a climax when a drowning occurs (by the means found in the title) setting the priorities of the grieving village against the money-driven timetable of the production crew.

Séan Campion and Conleth Hill play the two extras, Jake and Charlie, through whose eyes we see the events of two days unfold.  Jake is a local who always carries with him a copy of the screenplay he has written in hopes that this will be his key to fortune if only he can get someone to look at it.  Charlie is a drifter who has come here to make a bit of money.  The interaction between the two—Jake the optimist, Charlie the pessimist--is interesting enough, when gradually the two begin populating the stage with eleven other characters from both the village and the movie crew.

Conleth Hill is assigned the more widely differentiated set of characters, most notable the pampered, condescending movie star Caroline Giovanni, who is having a difficult time mastering an Irish dialect.  The scene where she tries unsuccessfully merely to nail down the word “father” is hilarious.  Hill also plays Jack, the overly suspicious, pot-bellied security guard; Clem the cynical British director; his exasperated assistant director Simon; Gerald, the village priest; and Finn, the lifelong friend of the addict Sean, both as an adult and as a child.

Seán Campion is assigned a generally more serious set of characters, the main exception being Ashley, the ever-hyper assistant to Simon (see above)and daughter of a famous director, who constantly jumps about asking everyone to “Settle”.  Campion also plays John, Caroline’s unlucky dialect coach; Mickey, an ancient local hero who claims to be the only surviving Irish extra from John Ford's classic film “The Quiet Man”; and Jake’s cousin Sean (now and as a child), a troubled 18-year-old drug addict who feels humiliated by being rejected as an extra and later by being thrown out of a pub for bothering Miss Giovanni.

Critics who speak of an actor’s playing one role well as a tour de force simply haven’t seen this show.  At first, Hill and Campion leave the stage to return as a different character using a change of posture, voice and gesture to signal the switch.  As the action revs up and more characters are introduced, the two need only a simple half turn to transform themselves.  These sudden shifts are so quick and the characterizations so precise that at times it is difficult to believe that there are only two people on stage.  This is especially true near the end when Hill and Campion manage to evoke the entire cast we’ve seen in a wordless, unbelievably funny Irish dance sequence meant as the film’s finale.

Director Ian McElhinney, Jones’s husband, deserves praise for consistently choosing exactly the right pace for every scene.  He also ensures that the constant shape-shifting of his actors is not an end in itself but a means to telling a story of wide-ranging moods, beginning in satire, deepening in tragedy and ending with comic affirmation. 

As a critique of that most expensive and high-tech of entertainments, it is fully appropriate that the design of the show be as simple as possible.  Jack Kirwan’s set consists of only a backdrop of clouds in a sprocket-holed frame and a long line of shoes.  Under James C. McFetridge’s lighting, the backdrop takes on as many moods, from menacing to benign, as does the plot, as do the actors.  The only props, a trunk on wheels and a box, serve as everything--desk, table, bar, chair, fence. 

Though billed as a comedy, “Stones in His Pockets” addresses a number of serious topics.  The attack on Hollywood is also a general attack on the appropriation of culture.  The Americans’ wish to present a picture of an Ireland full of “quaint” folk conforming to American preconceptions is not unlike the British in Brian Friel’s “Translations” who want to make Ireland more acceptable by Angicizing Irish place-names.  Jones contrasts America, where stories are only concocted for gain, with Ireland, where story-telling is a way of life and the soul of a community.  Commenting upon the death of the young man referred to in the play’s title, the village priest says: “Imagination is a curse in a country like this”—a common theme in Irish literature where the wealth of imagination come up against the everyday reality of poverty.  But just as Jake and Charlie find a way to tell a story where “the extras are the stars and the stars are the extras”, Jones’s play and its miraculous performances point to the transformational power in anyone who is willing to imagine.

Photo: Conleth Hill and Séan Campion. ©2001 Joan Marcus