The Matchmaker is an iconic play by the Irish playwright John B. Keane. Although people don’t particularly know much about Keane, if you mention the play there isn’t a person who can’t name the author. Keane, who wrote about 20 plays in his lifetime, died in 2002 at the age of 74. His best-known play is probably The Field, but The Matchmaker comes close. It is a two-person play about life in rural Ireland in the 1950s, although for some bizarre reason this production included the word computer in the script. The entire play is done as a series of letters between the matchmaker, an elderly country man who is widowed during the play (we never see his wife), and the various objects of his matchmaking. The dialogue is suggestive, lurching toward bawdy, but a child would suffer terminal boredom rather than shock if he or she should happen to be dragged to a performance by her parents.
Sadly, the boredom would have set in very early in this particular revival at the Tivoli Theatre in Dublin. The Tivoli is on its own in an unglamorous neighborhood in Dublin, across the river from the center of Irish theatre obeisance, The Abbey. It is a worn-down place with an abandoned air. For this production there was no program and the concession area was locked up tight.
The two actors who performed are as iconic as the play itself. Mary McEvoy and Mick Lally were the couple in a long-running series on Irish TV. Given the subject matter and the density of Lally’s accent, the series would not be likely to have arrived in America; Ballykissangel it wasn’t. But they are beloved by Irish audiences, and certainly have deserved their place in the pantheon of top Irish performers. The play, with its long monologish letters, must be massively challenging to memorize. Lally tackled this problem by not bothering. He sat at a table with the script to his side. Every time he paused and said, Now, we knew that he would turn to the script for prompting about the next section of his speech. Every once in awhile he would remember that he was supposed to be in character and would pump his arms suggestively or make another sort of half-hearted gesture. This would all be bad enough, but I swear the man had been drinking. He delivered his lines in quick slurs, with none of the cadence of Irish speech that makes listening to so much talking such a pleasant experience. To top all of this off, Lally chose to mug for the audience when he went into one of his five or six characters, pulling a fedora down over his forehead and putting on a goofy expression. The friend who invited me said at intermission that she was concerned about my understanding Lally’s accent; it would have been fine if that had been the only difficulty.
Beside this phoned-in excuse for a performance, McEvoy looked even more brilliant. Since she wasn’t so tied to her table (she did look at the script when the light went off her but she never read her lines), she was able to stand downstage and actually act. One recurring character in particular, a twice-widowed woman who only wanted someone lively to bed her, was especially effective.
The best part of the evening was the discovery of a restaurant, Just Off Francis, improbably around the corner from the theatre. I sat in the narrow café eating seafood risotto and soaking in Dublin, happy to be in a city for a change.
Two nights later I was in a car being driven to Mullingar, a town larger and more dynamic than Edenderry but otherwise without much distinction. Una, her daughter Emma and I were heading to the movies. There is an ironic disconnect between the passion the Irish have for cinema and the number of places where they can see them. Films (the Irish pronounce this word as if it had two syllables—fill-im) feed an inclination for the romantic and provide a window to elsewhere, away from this island; in practical terms I suppose they connect those (few) that are still here to those (many) who have left.
This night out was going to include tea, meaning an early and light dinner, and shopping, Penney’s for Emma and Marks & Spencer for Una and me. The movie we were seeing was Irish produced. It is written and directed by Ken Waldrop. His & Hers is a loosely linked series of conversations with Irish girls and women. The point of view is set with the proverb at the start of the film:
An Irish man loves his girlfriend the most, his wife the best, and his mother the longest.
The first image is of a diapered baby being set down in a crib by male hands. The baby becomes a toddler, then a girl, then a teenager. The girls talk about their fathers (me da, they say here), then their boyfriends, their fiancés, their husbands, their sons, then their fathers again. They become widows, both weepy and resilient. Finally, they are old women on their own. It is a poignant and surprisingly powerful film, and even though the women all speak in relationship to their men, you are never left with any sense of their helplessness or dependence. In fact it is quite the opposite; these women know who they are. This is not a film about inclusion: there are no divorced women, no fatherless daughters, no childless women (or at least none whose identity revolves around childlessness).
All of the girls and women are from the Irish Midlands, where Waldrop grew up. One, a doctor’s wife and local councilwoman, is from Edenderry. But we don’t know this from the film; none of the speakers are identified in these serial conversations, and they are listed only by name, in order of appearance, at the end. Still, they endure in your memory as they do now on the screen. It is a beautiful film, and a tribute to the women as well as to the man who had the foresight and perhaps the audacity to ask these women to talk to the camera.
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