Nun’s Island Theatre, Galway Theatre
Festival
Oct 26-27
My review of Caroline
Lynch’s Almost a Fantasy coming up just as soon as I think “there goes
my venue” ...
The Victorian drawing
room drama with its intellectual subjects and social trivialities often
serves as a model for contemporary comedy. Never have I seen it swung to such
fantastical distance as in Caroline Lynch’s Almost
a Fantasy, a debut which sucks logic, realism and other textual particles
into its orbit only to fling them on their way again as far away as Pluto.
Newlyweds Donna
and George watch the sunrise from their honeymoon suite. She soon after wishes
to tell him stories involving a tiny woman bearing a banner saying “shut up” and
moon-dust (which is more fizzy than one might think) but he’s too busy playing
piano in his mind to listen. George is seemingly suffering from some sort of
Beethoven complex, looking to adopt the composer’s history of falling in love
with his students. Donna on the other hand claims to be amnesiac and can’t
recall a wedding between them ever taking place. A chambermaid in a wedding
gown enters proceedings, a runaway bride possibly carrying the train in this
metaphysical matrimony or threatening to knock the betrothed even further off
course.
Lynch’s play is
an anomaly of different aesthetics and cultural narratives. The glamour and
flavour of her descriptions suggest a poetic fluency that well could have
dominated and crushed this stage script into an epic poem. Instead, she manages
to knit such artistry into an absurdist play, crackling with a wit that is
flung like sharp cutlery across the stage with Mametian momentum. Such is also
to the credit of expert deliveries by Lynch herself, as well as Martin Maguire
and Helen Gregg. Wedding dress and tux are exchanged hands along with sexual
affections, and as the play swoops into the territory of gender performativity
we can’t help but wonder if Lynch is looking to throw her champagne in the face
of the ceremony of matrimony as well.
Furthermore, Almost a Fantasy could be interpreted as
an assault on the Georgian notion of men playing the piano and women having to
sit at the window and listen. The heroine of the tale, somehow endorsed by the
moon, is gifted with a perceptivity that forensically renders the speckles and textures
of life so fantastical that her husband and his obvious lack of real musical
talent are diminished. If this is a gender argument (with “shut up” serving as
a lynchpin), Lynch does well to provide balance, revealing an insecure
sexuality at the heart of George’s obsession with the piano. The high heels don’t
stay on for long, and the play becomes more apparent as an individual arc of
commitment and preparation. If theatre as psychiatry is this comical and
magical, I’ll certainly have another serving.
With Almost a Fantasy, Lynch successfully claims
her corner of the theatre universe, aligning the stars in a manner one might
think impossible. Her gravity as a playwright is only beginning to be felt.
What did
everybody else think?
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