Finborough, London
Last year this venturesome venue gave us a riveting portrait of Belfast's Protestant culture in St John Ervine's Mixed Marriage (1911). Now it crosses the border to show us Catholic passions in rural Cork in a rare revival of a 1924 work by TC Murray, who became a pillar of Dublin's Abbey Theatre. What strikes me is that tragedy, at the very time it was expiring in England, was flourishing across the Irish sea.
Murray makes no bones about his tragic intentions: his play is clearly intended as an Irish variation on the classical story of Phaedra. His hero, Owen Keegan, is a boisterous, widowed farmer who, to the dismay of his grown-up daughter and son, marries a girl half his age. When Owen is bed-bound after a riding accent, the growing passion between his wife and son bursts into uncontrollable life. The problem is that Murray, writing as a devout Catholic and former headmaster, cannot disguise his innate moralism: his play almost reads like a lecture on the folly of May-to-December marriages.
But Murray also has the Irish dramatist's gift for the vividly unexpected phrase: at one point, the pent-up Owen describes the frustration of "hearing the cows gadding about in the heat". And, as one of the so-called "Cork realists", Murray had a deep understanding of rural frustration. Indeed the most tragic character in the play is Owen's daughter, Ellen, who is described as "a young woman having no youth" and who seems doomed to a life of farmhouse drudgery. The role is also exquisitely played, in Veronica Quilligan's sensitive revival, by Aoife McMahon, who suggests a buried emotional longing that has never found fulfilment. Luke Hayden as the larger-than-life Owen and Valene Kane as the sprightly, soft-spoken girl he marries also give fine performances in a revealing revival. It's intriguing to think that, while Dublin was relishing Autumn Fire, London was first enjoying Hay Fever: two plays, two different worlds.