Review Theatre: Money from America | Old Red Lion Theatre | Poitin Irish moonshine | Comeragh Mountains Ireland

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The Review - THEATRE by DAN FRANKLIN
Published: 14 August 2008

Money from America - Mouths full of cotton wool and moonshine

MONEY FROM AMERICA
Old Red Lion Theatre

JACK Carey (Frank Fitzpatrick) returns home to the foothills of the Comeragh Mountains in Ireland after 30 years spent seeking his fortune in America and sending money home to his younger brother Lardy (Alexander Gordon-Wood).
Lardy has tended the family farm with only Molly the pig farmer (Jackie Skarvellis) for company, but he has kept himself busy with an illicit sideline in Poitin-making. Poitin is a viciously strong Irish moonshine. It induces catatonic states of drunkenness and hallucination, which might explain the sluggish plot and woozy performances of this Croft production.
The disorientation is immediate: when the characters open their mouths it’s hard to distinguish where we are supposed to be, most hamming an Irish accent as if they are talking with a mouth full of cotton wool.
Luckily the plot is straightforward enough: Jack and his fiancée Phyllis (Jacqueline Jordan) want to sell the farm in order to buy a guesthouse on the coast. Phyllis proclaims this as a lifetime ambition, which gives Molly the opportunity to wax lyrical about her starry-eyed dream to be on the stage (natch), and a relationship with an abusive husband which was a “whirlwind” she blames on the “folly of youth”.
By the time she finishes her monologue it is no surprise to hear that her long-suffering ex-husband Bernard drank himself into such a stupor that he drowned in one of his pig troughs.
Unsurprisingly, Lardy is resistant to selling the property and when Jack is found dead after a late-night booze marathon between the two brothers, the inept and Father Dougal-ish local sergeant (Seamus Casey) and Dublin’s finest, McClusky (Jimmy O’Rourke), are immediately on to him.
O’ Rourke’s gaping-fish delivery adds humour to proceedings, off-setting the flashbacks to a young Molly (Josephine McCaffrey) embroiled in a love triangle with Bernard, Lardy and Jack.
The untangling of this web leads to the play’s central revelations, but neither the writing nor the production lend them particular clout.
Until August 30
020 7833 3053

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