Irish stew

Dancing at Lughnasa
Old Vic

Burnt by the Sun
Lyttelton

It’s almost physically painful to see the vandalism wrought at the Old Vic by the new stage configuration. It’s like looking at some doomed Darwinian experiment, a cloven-hoofed butterfly, a spaniel with a trunk, a winged slug. Worse still is the fussy, over-ambitious set for Anna Mackmin’s production of Dancing at Lughnasa. Apparently, no one realised that bolting a sycamore tree, yes an entire tree, to the upright of the proscenium arch and then dumping a big old stove next to it would look a bit weird. Arch, tree, stove, all in a line. Strangest thing I’ve seen all year. The play is a classic Irish wrist-slasher from the Frank McCourt school of rural suicidalism. Take cover, everyone. Blarney attack.

We’re in the 1930s and five sisters, mostly virgins, are trapped in a fetid backwater yearning for fulfilment. Little simpering Rose pines for her lost love. So does little simpering Christina. Whining Agnes is half-dead with housework while whimsical Maggie cheers up Misery Manor with ancient limericks and Christmas cracker jokes. Nasty old Kate, with a face like something made by Black and Decker, has lost her teaching job but kept her wheedling school-room stridency and there’s a demented uncle moping in the wings, Fr Jack, a failed African missionary who suffers from psychosis, malaria and unrequited longings for his house-boy. What else? A pretentious chorus figure mooches in and out and gives away the ending half way through act two which, I need hardly tell you, involves alcoholism, destitution, old age, loneliness, death, death and a bit more death. In case this wasn’t depressing enough, he then delivers a symbolist lecture on the worldless significance of dance.

Some of the acting is as decent as the script will allow.