Gutting fish in Dublin

Canterbury sports a flashy new theatre, the Marlowe Theatre. See reference 1. On the middle day of our stay there it was offering the full monty in the big theatre and a new play called 'Gutted' in the small theatre, aka the studio.

The outside of the theatre was rather nicely illuminated with bold stripes of various shades of blue and purple. Stripes which were cunningly adjusted to the geometry of the building.

The audience for the full monty appeared to be almost exclusively women while that for gutted was more comfortably mixed, both by sex and by age.

The play was the work of a lady called Sharon Byrne, who started life in Dublin, and is set in a fish processing plant in the same city.

Good start in that the set was mainly composed of small piles of blue plastic boxes, identical in all but colour to that snapped left. With this last having been acquired from the beach at somewhere like Birling Gap in Sussex or Seatown in Dorset, and has served BH for years as a garden rubbish receptacle. My job being to empty it into the compost bin at the end of the day.

The cast consisted of three ladies gutting fish, say two in their twenties and one in her thirties, and the story consisted of rather muddled insights into their complicated private lives.

The budding author did not seem to understand that having her actresses (attempting to) speak in very thick Dublin accents, while adding a touch of authenticity, did not help comprehension. Nor that having every other word an expletive or every other phrase something rather coarse, while again adding a touch of authenticity, ended up by irritating more than it informed or entertained.

One came away with the impression that the working class Dublin of the 1980's was a pretty grim place, plenty of black humour notwithstanding. To the point where one wondered how the play would go down in Dublin.

The three actresses knew their business, two of them particularly, and did well with their material. Even so, the play, at a little over an hour, was a bit too long. They should have cut or pruned the rather naff ending and got it down to a little under an hour.

Much the same tone as, say, the Bretécher cartoons which used to go the rounds of femmy circles in the same years. A play more for women than men. But interesting to see a bit of fringe for a change.

PS: seats very uncomfortable for someone of my height. Knees in the seat in front and nowhere to put the toes.

Reference 1: http://www.marlowetheatre.com/.

Reference 2: http://www.clairebretecher.com/. Last mentioned at the address given below.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/lawrences.html.

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