Last Orders at the Dockside review: An old-fashioned play, and not because it's set in the 1980s

A community joins in paying tribute to a dead man in Dermot Bolger's new play. Photo: Ros Kavanagh  

Abbey Theatre, Dublin Theatre Festival

★ ★

Long before we hear the first musical notes of Fiddler’s Green in the Abbey Theatre’s new play Last Order’s at the Dockside, the Dublin docklands seems a distant past. But it’s not the 1980s setting of Dermot Bolger’s script that feels old-fashioned. 

Inside a quayside pub, a woman Maisie (Bríd Ní Neachtain) arrives from her husband’s funeral. She’s soon joined by loved ones, several of them dockworkers at a time when job-holders are pushing redundancies. The bar itself is due to close the following day. This is a community on the cusp of change. 

Over glasses of lager and gin, memories of dead fathers float to the surface. Brothers Sean (Aidan Kelly) and Chris (Stephen Jones) reflect on how they followed and un-followed their forebear’s footsteps, into trade union work and political campaigning. Cathy (Lisa Lambe), a mother watching her neighbourhood dissolve through drugs, resents the denied opportunities of her youth. Everyone has a perspective, but they aren’t always shared in ways that feel authentic. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” says Chris’s new girlfriend Lyn (Juliette Crosbie), being frank about working conditions for nurses. We don’t know either. 

Such glib dialogue often feels underwhelmingly demotic. At one point, a dock worker Alfie (Anthony Brophy), indebted to a criminal, asks about a mysterious shipment. “Curiosity killed the cat,” says Terry O’Neill’s Macker, the play’s serious villain. More artificial are the realisations that sound like character notes. “I realised the truth. I wasted my intelligence,” says Maisie, facing the future with new purpose, while spelling out her arc. 

If that seems convenient, it’s because the play is more concerned with mapping its reality, through a peculiarly old blend of social realism and melodrama. The researched details of real life meet the wishful music of happily ever after. Against the fully atomised precarity of a city’s inhabitants, happiness becomes dependent on the ownership of homes and truthful exchanges of affection. In between blowouts, characters request sentimental songs. 

That kind of self-expression in a social drama can produce its own music. (“Please remember this is Italian opera,” said a director staging a Bernard Shaw play.) But the characters’ opinions don’t spark that much against each other. The energy between exchanges doesn’t really form any critique of power structures either. Characters are flattened like biographies, rationing out their fraught admissions, before asking Lisa Lambe’s Cathy to sing them another tune.

Director Graham McLaren has been combining period drama and traditional music since at least 2013’s In Time O’ Strife. But in the Abbey, that approach can easily veer into sentimentality to the point of twee. It can make the national theatre look nostalgic for its programming from the previous century. 

Runs until Oct 26th.