The Matchmaker - John B. Keane

New York, Irish Repertory Theatre
February 5 - March 31

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    Twenty five years ago, on its first appearance, John B. Keane’s The Matchmaker was both funny and daring. The play tells the story of a country matchmaker who corresponds with a variety of lonely rural males and females eager to find a mate. The stories are told through the reading aloud of the correspondence between the man and his clients. They are a mixture of comic, tragic, dramatic, and bizarre, and all of them are centrally concerned with sex.
    What was daring about the show in 1976 was its frankness about sexuality and sexual attitudes in rural Ireland. At a time when the subject was still relatively taboo, or certainly handled with a great deal of care, Keane wrote about the wants and needs of Irish men and women with the no-nonsense pragmatism demonstrated in The Field and Big Maggie. Though sex is mostly spoken of in euphemisms in the play (which change depending on the background of the person writing the letter), the play is run through with hilariously unabashed descriptions of characters and situations which are usually dead on target and laced with witty satire.
    Keane was once again thumbing his nose at traditional depictions of rural Ireland with a blend of cliche and subversion, moving attitudes into the seventies with the look and feel of the fifties. Gemini Productions’ twenty-fifth anniversary revival of this play proves that it is still funny and daring, though in an entirely new way. The humor still comes from the clash between Keane’s skills with realistic observation and his casual description of some outrageous sexual escapades and attitudes. Ireland has changed since 1976 however, and though the moral stranglehold of the Catholic church has been largely broken, the Puritanism of political correctness has slipped quickly and easily into the vacuum. The result is that there are still plenty of moments in The Matchmaker that challenge the audience. Its casual sexism and racism makes you shift uncomfortably as you laugh yourself silly. Its way of describing how men and women see each other is a far cry from the world of twee self-help books and gender sensitivity training.
    The story of a man who deals with his wife’s frigidity by slipping poitin into her hot milk smacks of date rape, yet with the warm and human way he describes it, you still find yourself seeing the funny side. The story of a man chasing a woman around a table in a pub with his trousers round his ankles is potentially horrific, yet seems logical under the circumstances as you hear tell of the consequences. Its climactic confrontation between the eponymous hero and a local priest is still a powerful moment, not because his defiance of the Church is shocking, but because it now seems prescient and righteous in a way which vindicates much of what Keane had to say elsewhere.
    Yet underlying The Matchmaker's challenge to ‘decency’ is a strong sense of human need. The play ends with a powerful assertion of the importance of human contact which transgresses ephemeral social concerns. The phrase ‘looking for love’ has never seemed so apt, even when all anyone seems really to want is a good roll in the hay (or ride on the horse, or pound on the anvil... take your pick of euphemisms; they’re all in there somewhere). Keane knows people and he gets to the heart of his characters with great skill .
    The production is beautifully performed by vets Anna Manahan (the original Big Maggie herself) and Des Keogh. Each actor plays several characters, usually changing stance or voice to indicate transition (and using the odd bit of costume as well). Manahan is hilarious as the unfortunate Miss Crust, landed with not one but two impotent husbands who die within a short time of her wedding, and Keogh laces his portrayal of a sexually deviant Anglo-Irish ascendancy type with wonderful irony. Because there are a mixture of stories told, the actors get to play many moods. Manahan and Keogh are good at every turn, fully in tune with the slippery and insightful dialogue which Keane weaves cleverly through the laughter.
    There are some beautiful moments of drama and pathos here, and even some poetic imagery which seems to emerge quite naturally despite the prevailing tone of comedy. Far from the stage Irish bunch of malarkey it might sound like at first, this is an intelligent and incisive work of theatre which hits out at Irish mores just as hard as any of Keane’s dramas. It is rich, clever, and rewarding, but it is also extremely funny. That it may still raise a hackle or two among those prone to offence makes it all the more enjoyable, because Irish theatre has to have an edge if it is to survive and there are few voices today as able to pull in the crowds and still make them think while they’re clapping as Keane.