23 August – 14 September
The Cirencester Barn Theatre’s recreation of Marie Jones’s award-winning Stones in His Pockets was first staged in 2022 during the pandemic and inevitably struggled to find an audience. But a recent successful run at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast and now the English re-opening in Cirencester prior to a tour demonstrates just how popular and powerful is this new production.
The setting is a backwater town in Kerry, a landscape with ‘fifty shades of green’. A Hollywood film company has pitched up in town to make ‘The Quiet Valley’, a bog-standard tale of love, dispossession and eventual romantic triumph. The film is good business for the locals, not least those employed as extras. But there is bound to be tension between the ritzy outsiders and the ‘natives’, as one of the film’s Assistant Directors casually refers to them. And, more significant perhaps, an unbridgeable gap between the schmaltzy Oirishness of the film and the realities of Irish rural life.
The play focuses on two extras, Charlie and Jake. They are nicely contrasted. Charlie (Gerard McCabe) is the more optimistic – or perhaps self-deluding – of the two, even though his video-renting business has gone bust. He’s written a script which he is convinced will be his ticket to the big time. All he needs to do is catch the attention of one of the fine film folk swanning around.
Jake (Shaun Blaney) is resigned and realistic. Like so many he has tried his luck in America but is now back where he started. Why? ‘I was homesick’ is the simple answer. The two men provide a running commentary on the action unfurling around them, on the absurdity and sentimentality of the film.
They are caught up in the action too. All the male extras ogle Caroline Giovanni, the glamorous, preening star of the film who is ever-ready to claim ancestry (‘I’m third-generation, you know, on my mother’s side’). She takes a shine to Jake and invites him back to her hotel and into her Winnebago, comic episodes which produce spluttering consternation among the others. Meanwhile Charlie attempts to interest everyone from the director down in his script even though Jake informs him it’s ‘the biggest load of oul bollicks I have ever read in my life.’
Undercutting the comedy is the poignancy of the gap between glossy film and tarnished lives, between aspiration and defeat. There is real tragedy too when a young man walks into the sea, his pockets freighted with stones. The guilty aftermath of the suicide propels much of the action of the second half but the metaphor of carrying a weight – of memory, of delusion – that will sink you applies to several of the characters in the play.
The most remarkable aspect of this production is that every single role of the 15 or so in Stones in His Pockets is played by the two principals. With the twist of a cap, the reversal of a jacket, the untucking of a shirt, Gerard McCabe and Shaun Blaney switch from priest to film director, from schoolboy to young druggy, with astonishing dexterity. The audience particularly liked McCabe’s impersonation of the preening Caroline Giovanni, when he seems to be channeling Cupid Stunt, and Blaney’s version of old Mickey, whose claim to fame is that he was once an extra on John Wayne’s ‘The Quiet Man’. One particular sequence in which they switch between characters with the hectic speed of a tennis volley earned an ovation.
Set and costume design by Gregor Donnelly and lighting under the direction of Alex Musgrave are an integral part of this very accomplished show, and enable the audience to follow the action and the multiple character changes with ease. The two players have a great rapport with each other – at a couple of points they almost lose control and start corpsing – and, above all, with their delighted audience. Director Matthew McElhinny has triumphed with this production of Stones in His Pockets.
★★★★★ Philip Gooden 28 August 2024
photographers credit @ Alex Tabrizi
