Family tensions

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 20th January 2010

Greta Garbo Came to Donegal
Tricycle

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
Olivier

Frank McGuinness, the world’s leading supplier of Celtic Kleenex drama, is back with a variation on his favourite theme. Misery upon misery bravely borne in a green, green island long, long ago. The twist is the addition of Greta Garbo. In 1967, the wandering superstar visited McGuinness’s home town of Buncrana in Donegal. This nugget of truth is decorated with fictional frills. McGuinness billets the melancholy hermit on an invented Irish family, the Hennessys, whose house has been bought by a society painter from England. The toiling Irish underlings are thus condemned to scrub and skivvy in a mansion their ancestors once owned. Family tensions are accentuated by this daily humiliation. Money is tight, drink is plentiful, hope is fragile and short-lived. The senior family members have fallen into unbreakable patterns of behaviour. Everyone makes jokes about Sylvia, whose looks are supposed to be fading. But the running gag keeps tripping up on the concrete of reality.

Sylvia is played by Angeline Ball, a twinkly thirtysomething blonde whose manifest beauty makes nonsense of every insult and wisecrack. The arrival of Sweden’s gloomiest has-been adds very little by way of mirth or gaiety. In real life Garbo was the last thing in female mystique. Here she reinforces the notion that an ‘enigmatic’ woman (like Jackie Onassis and Kate Moss after her) is just a boring one who’s turned her limitations into a publicity angle.

McGuinness has applied his craft to the glacial Swede but not his artistry. He can’t lift her beyond a series of colorations and shadings. Gaunt, moody, distant and humourless, she’s as predictable as night following day or lager louts following darts. She’s not remotely likeable and she has an irritating, albeit credible, habit of talking about herself as if she were the secretary of her own fan club. ‘Garbo laughs!’ she exclaims after tittering at something funny. ‘Once it would have made headlines.’ The portrait is convincing but dramatically motionless. She alters, and is altered by, nothing. She arrives, she sits, she comments, she pushes off.

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