A suicide, a wake, and a funeral: only the Irish can pull that off on stage and call it a comedy.
Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets is set in a village in contemporary rural southwest Ireland, where local Jake Quinn (Richard Gélinas) and drifter Charlie Conlon (Zach Counsil) are making £80 a day as extras on the set of a Hollywood film—along with most of the rest of the town. When the film’s star, Caroline Giovanni (also Zach Counsil) decides to fraternize with the locals, Jake in particular, it sets off a tragic chain of events that exposes the hopelessness, despair, and lack of direction in a society whose way of life has been forcibly stripped away.
Counsil and Gélinas, once again under John P. Kelly’s spirited direction (as in last season’s The 39 Steps), switch with alarming frequency between what seems like a dozen characters each—without the aid of costume changes to differentiate between the roles. Thanks to their versatility in characterization (the playwright’s apparent penchant for having characters call each other by name, in most plays a textual liability, helps markedly here), there is no confusion between their roles. Gélinas shows a touch more separation between his characters than Counsil does, and it may be just me but I can’t get behind the choices made for the portrayal of Caroline Giovanni. The best, most memorable moments in the play come from Counsil and Gélinas’s purely physical acting, and these scenes are, appropriately, augmented by the best use of David Magladry’s lighting. This includes a brief dance sequence choreographed by Gladstone co-owner Steve Martin (an accomplished dance instructor and comic performer in his own right). Kelly has taken a text that is dear to him and worked closely with the cast to create a clear, coherent production that moves swiftly and entertains the audience.
If you look past the performance, the play itself has serious shortcomings. The central problem with it is that the character who dies is not sympathetic. No matter the—often clumsy—effort of the playwright to have the characters say how sympathetic he is, he’s just not there long enough nor does he demonstrate enough likeable qualities to establish him as someone we can, or do, care about. Maybe we pity him, at the most. His death does not come as an emotional shock for the audience, and it’s hard to believe it truly does for the other characters either. There’s also very little link between character and story, in that it’s hard to see why the characters do what they do because their actions don’t spring naturally from their personalities.
There is no mistaking that Stones in His Pockets is about the Irish in Ireland. It contains certain elements common to many plays from the Irish canon—most obviously the spirit of old Ireland: the old man (in some plays it’s a woman) rebelliously, and drunkenly, singing an entire Irish song as he asserts his rejection of (and personal triumph over) the changing culture. The theme of cultural assimilation aided by encroaching outsiders, although not quite universal, is hardly exclusively Irish. It is a recurring primary theme in Irish theatre, just as it is in French-Canadian, Aboriginal, and even contemporary English Canadian theatre (Highway 63: The Fort Mac Story serves as a comparable recent example). The theme of escape seems as suited to Ottawa as it does to a rural community in the face of development and expansion.
It’s almost impossible not to compare Stones in His Pockets with The 39 Steps, seeing as how they were both directed by John P. Kelly and feature the same style of comic acting between Counsil and Gélinas (although in The 39 Steps they had AL Connors and Kate Smith to act with, and against). Yet Stones in His Pockets falls short of The 39 Steps in terms of energy and comedic effect. Why? I think the answer lies in the factors that shaped the writing of each text. Where The 39 Steps was adapted by a pair of comic actors specifically to showcase two actors taking on multiple small roles, Stones in His Pockets is an ordinary play written with multiple characters, but arranged so that only two actors fill all the roles. One was born from a creative challenge, the other from a limitation, and it shows.
Stones in His Pockets is clearly a difficult text to work with, and director John P. Kelly’s devotion to it coupled with Counsil and Gélinas’s clear talent for portraying multiple characters brings out its best qualities, and it makes for an enjoyable start to the Gladstone Theatre’s 2012–13 season.
Stones in His Pockets runs until the 29th of September. Tickets are available through The Gladstone’s box office.
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