Skylight - David Hare

Dublin, Project Arts Center
January 21 - February 7
(to be extended)

skylight.jpg (9014 bytes)

Purple Grapes at Night Chenille
Overnight Carpetbag with Shoulder Strap

    Why should a decade-old, three-character domestic drama running in a Temple Bar theatre result in a storm of publicity sufficient to have its director interviewed in The Sunday Times about his cooking and dining routines? Skylight, David Hare’s 1995 chamber piece which followed the post-Thatcherite trilogy Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, and The Absence of War, concerns the reunion of two lovers after three years of separation.
    Kyra (Cathy Belton) is a young schoolteacher working in one of London’s less salubrious districts and commuting from another. Tom (Owen Roe) is a wealthy entrepreneur and her former married lover whose wife has only recently died of cancer. Following an opening scene visit from Tom’s son Edward (Michael FitzGerald), who seems eager to foster some kind of understanding between Kyra and Tom, Tom himself arrives bearing a gift of whisky on a cold winter evening. The stage seems hardly set for searing, epic drama here, at least not on a scale sufficient to merit the impassioned introduction in the program from Irish playwright Frank McGuinness (Gates of Gold).
    In itself Skylight is certainly a good piece of work. It is a well crafted debate in play form pitting the values in mid 1990s Britain against one another in a search for some core of human contact between the ideological opposites. Kyra is the daughter of a lawyer now embracing a kind of social service mentality lionized by a previous generation. Tom meanwhile is a self-made man who has risen from "ordinary" circumstances to become one of the new generation of businessmen allegedly concerned with "the creation of wealth" rather than mere acquisition. Who is kidding whom and which is kidding themselves?
    Cleverly structured around simple domestic actions (Kyra prepares dinner all through the second act) and a slowly unfolding backstory, the drama operates on both personal and political levels. Hare uses the simple technique of alternating loaded dialogue between two arguing individuals to put forward conflicting social and political points of view. By virtue of good basic writing, the audience is held by the personal story amidst the increasingly obvious ideological debate.
    Belton and Rowe are both absolutely convincing, delivering performances of such intensity that real tears seem to flow down both their faces at key moments. It is rare to see this kind of hard, naturalistic personal drama on the Irish stage and the actors obviously relish the opportunity to play it. Director Michael Caven makes excellent use of space throughout, employing every nook and cranny of Joe Vanek’s studio apartment set to keep the notion of physical proximity and distance in play. FitzGerald (Sive) is also very good, though his appearances are confined to the opening and closing scenes.
    So why is this a sell-out show? Why has every preview been packed to the rafters and why is this the hottest ticket in town? The answer is in Frank McGuinness’ introduction, which begins "The Irish theatre avoids British writing." The reason, he explains, is that "The new Ireland, increasingly fixated on a sentimental reading of its past and present, more and more shies away from serious confrontation in the theatre. Well, that’s been our loss, and not least with regard to David Hare."
    Watching Skylight, it is clear that this is a very different kind of theatrical experience from what we have become used to on the Irish stage. Hare’s drama takes place in the midst of what Billy Roche once called "a world without metaphor." In Irish plays, this kind of class conflict dialectic is usually cast in broad symbols and grand statements to which the drama rarely measures in itself (think of the disastrous Hinterland for an example). The recourse therefore usually is to more mythic and historical pieces which, as McGuinness notes, can (though they don’t always) tend towards the sentimental.
    It is good to see David Hare on the Irish stage precisely because he does provide an alternative to the usual stuff, and this is a good play which has been very well acted and directed. The excitement is understandable in the context of the history of Irish and British theatre and there are enough strong qualities to the production to make it a likely contender for awards this year. Whether it justifies sufficient excitement to merit reading about Caven’s eating habits in the Sunday newspapers is another question again.