Playboyz at Dublin Theatre Festival
Playboyz, written by Martin Sharry and premiering in this year’s Dublin Theatre festival makes fascinating parallels between the original, The Playboy of The Western World by J.M. Synge. This manages to prove just how relevant the themes of old texts may still be in our modern society, yet remaining steadfastly its own. The text itself is semi auto-biographical, semi inspired by the afore-mentioned original as well as remaining fluid enough to allow the actors to bring themselves into the story as much as possible, sound confusing? Well, speaking honestly, at times the action was hard to follow and by Act 2 it began to feel surreal and disconnected, perhaps intentionally but nonetheless leaving it hard to draw a succinct narrative or interpretation.
Sharry says that his motivation for writing the play was wanting to write about somebody living in Direct Provision—an asylum seeker. This lead to his meeting of Solomon Osho who moved to Ireland in 2001 from Nigeria and was part of the Direct Provision system. Although the link between an asylum seeker’s story and The Playboy may seem tenuous, Sharry defends it by pointing to the similarities between the new arrival Christy Mahon and his efforts to ‘integrate’ into a new community and a refugee in Ireland, also wishing to become welcome in their new home. In the original, Mahon finds himself surrounded by gossip and stories projected upon him which he slowly begins to adopt himself. He is turned into a hero in the eyes of the villagers. In Playboyz ‘Patrick’ played by Kwaku Fortune, an economic migrant both in the play and in the actors’ own reality, finds himself playing the role of a refugee, a status that his counter parts assigned him and that he began to accept. That is, until he’s discovered, whereby “You’re only an economic migrant, that’s all!” becomes akin to the iconic “I’ve lost him surely, I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World”. Playboyz, with its many levels of artifice and metatheatricality seems to say, ‘nothing is as it seems’ as it questions and unravels the lines between truth and fiction, actor and person, irishness and racism.
The piece remained both searingly real; with candid, self-aware conversations and razor sharp observations, “ideology no longer has to pass through human consciousness”, yet bizarrely surreal in equal measure. In parts funny, provocative and more than a little enigmatic, Playboyz remains a fascinating play with strong performances from the actors Kwaku Fortune, Amy Conroy, Rebecca Guinnane, Conor Madden and John Cronin, who impressively joined the cast just a week before the performance. The cast is also joined by Solomon who, in poetic prose, tells his part of the story.
Production shots: Jaesin Yu.
Set and costume design: Deirdre Dwyer
Lighting: Eoin Winning
Sound: Brendan Rehill
