If you yearn for live performances of plays and music, inside, among others, it would be easy to think first of Van the Angry Man, or Eric Clapton, who engaged in a racist rant in 1976.
Don’t let them put you off an experience not enough of us have at the best of times. Morrison and Clapton have one thing right. Nothing beats live performance, and not just loud concerts outside. Making music or theatre together or gathering to watch and listen is good for people.
As GAA devotees and sports lovers need no telling, performers and audiences at their best need and play off each other. Stages are lighting up again. Audiences need to bring masks, and manners.
‘Rough Girls’ at the Lyric, the first professional theatre in Belfast since the pandemic began, finished its first run last Saturday after a full fortnight of lighting up a dark and tangled time in the city, with respect and something like love for our forebears. Plus disrespect where due. Take this, you who missed it, as encouragement to plead for another run. Maybe out of Belfast this time - when the cast get their breath back and rest their legs.
You will have heard already what it’s ‘about’, who the Rough Girls were. A crowd of 20,000 came out in those wicked years a century ago, to watch Belfast women play football against English women? The line-out is big enough for individuals to become blurred but each has her story-arc. First World War, the Suffragette struggle, blood on the streets as the state of Northern Ireland is born, all of this is texture to the story of a women’s football team.
2021 still has months to go, much of the memorialising already the opposite of inspiring. The actor Tara Lynne O’Neill by contrast has written something that will last. She should be very proud. The Lyric has a right to be delighted they commissioned her to write it.
Because she is a performer with heart as well as head and a seasoned sense of what theatre can do, plus a very fine cast, both script and her playing emphasise the team work O’Neill fronts up. Better yet, she caught today’s oddity and theatre’s resilience, as well a sense of the grim Twenties. The cruel poverty that almost every family has in its background is written in, women keeping each other in spirits through illness, loss, infertility, early deaths, being battered at home, exploited by factory bosses.
Reviewers praised direction, choreography, music, set, registered fun and passion as well as pathos but you need to see it to appreciate football staged without a single player kicking a ball. O’Neill must be tickled by complimentary comparison to Joan Littlewood, David Storey.
If some were nervous about being in the Lyric, it didn’t spoil the atmosphere. Covid rules on spacing means a smaller crowd. The familiarity of loyal theatre-goers came through in chanted responses to O’Neill’s old jokes, without her asking. A London reviewer wrote that as writer and actor she ‘telescopes the past with the present in a fourth wall-denying speech’. Playing an engaged Mistress of Ceremonies, two thirds into the show she still had the bandwidth for a matey grin across the footlights and a teasing, almost throwaway, ‘We missed you.’
A quick glance around suggested that some - distanced from strangers, masked throughout - misted up at that. Amid rough laughter and almost ceaseless movement it wasn’t the only moment of nearly-tears. O’Neill and director Kimberley Sykes, and actors on top form, know how to make silence tell in the midst of noise.
This paper’s Jane Hardy called the show ‘a genuinely beautiful piece of theatre’ and is sure it will be staged often. You think rave reviews perverse as the Lyric goes dark again? Much-admired Mojo Mickybo opens tomorrow, the new Border Game next Saturday. Two-handers, these, after the Rough Girls stage-filler, giving the best that’s in them.
On with the show.
