19 January 2012 (Theatre Review)

Star Rating: 2/5

Title: Those Sick and Indigent
Venue: Bewley's Café Theatre
Writer: Alan O'Regan
Director: Dan Reardon
Cast: Mark Lambert, Gerry O'Brien, Shane O'Reilly

Even though the secret lives of homeless people - the story behind the indigence, has already been the focus of a play this year (Pat Kinevane's startling, shaming and sardonic Silent) there is no reason why lightning shouldn't strike twice. Alan O'Regan's award winning debut has a worthy point to make. No one knows the tragedy that has resulted in these men living on the streets because nobody asks. It sets itself up as a hymn for those who have been left behind. But unfortunately the story is too sparse and the details too artlessly dispensed for it to have any impact.

Jack Gannon has died intestate. His possessions, left behind in a homeless shelter, are being catalogued for the state by a social worker, Ronan (Shane O' Reilly). "It's a saintly gesture," says Finbar (Mark Lambert) the adult resident assigned to help him, though you gather Ronan rather wishes he wouldn't. The straightforward task is fraught with his coarse interjections, particularly his ability to rile Gannon's already agitated roommate Joe (Gerry O'Brien) - the Bold Oxo, who cradles an urn and refuses to leave.

One man's junk are the treasures of another man's lifetime and O'Regan uses them to pique our curiosity about the departed Gannon twisting them like thorns in the side of the residents, goading them to expose their true natures revealing shades of the troubled past that color their present.

Each man conceals themselves beneath veils of professionalism and peculiarity and Finbar's cajoling of Joe hints at the power structure, the schoolyard politics of the shelter that would have made for more explosive and exploratory theatre. Instead the discovery of a letter and a photograph amongst the possessions lead us down a more melodramatic and well-trod route.

The performances are passable. In an underwritten role O'Reilly stamps authority a little too firmly, smudging any humor or consideration the part could have possessed. Lambert gurns and O'Brien lurches but you never get a sense of these characters existing outside of the confines of the play.

The sad - or perhaps apt - irony of the piece is that it is the living who remain like ghosts, haunting the remaining bric-a-brac of a man society passed by. It serviced O'Regan's point but as theatre it was unmoving and unenlightening.

 

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