No Ordinary Fool

Joe: I don’t read the news part any more. It’s more interesting in the want ads.

Frank: Why, you trying to buy something?

Joe: No, I’m just interested. To see what people want, y’know?

Much is rightly made of the central character of Joe in this play by Arthur Miller. However, it is George that really haunts the memory. Headstrong, brave, passionate, and principled, he went to war an earnest boy and came back a grey-haired and ashen-faced man. His firebrand righteousness as he arrives on stage proves to be little more than a mask for a timid, submissive, and childlike personality that should never have been exposed to the horrors that it has seen. Worse follows when George (wonderfully played here by Peter Gaynor) sees the girl-next-door that could have been his, had his head not been full of fighting fascism. Now she is married to a man half his worth, while George cuts a lost and lonely figure deserving of some goodness in his life. Yet, the manner in which even that is to be ripped away from him is so bitterly cruel. He departs the stage the tragic epitome of a lost generation.

Indeed, this play seeks to explore the differences between the generation that came through the Great Depression and the subsequent one that went to war. Joe, the patriarch of the Keller family, has built up a successful manufacturing business. The struggle to do so has taught him the value of a dollar and what it means to take care of his family. Still, the war has made him a wealthy man thanks to being able to supply parts to the US Air Force. On the other hand, his eldest son Larry has been officially missing-in-action for three years now and a dark shadow has hung over Joe ever since his business supplied defective parts that ended up killing 21 airmen. However, Joe was ultimately cleared of any criminal negligence in the affair.

His younger son Chris (Garrett Lombard), though, feels guilt for still being alive when so many of his comrades are not. Although working for his father, it is not his passion and he is finding it hard to readjust to a civilian life that already seems to have snapped back, elastic band-like, to a normalcy that he no longer understands. Hope, though, exists in his love for Ann (Niamh McCann), with whom he has corresponded with for some time and who hopefully has similar feelings for him The only problem is that Ann was Larry’s girlfriend and Chris’ mother Kate passionately believes that he is still alive and will, one day, return.

Indeed, the arrival of Ann proves to be the trigger that  re-opens old wounds before leading to the ultimate revelation of each character’s true motivations. Taking place over twenty-four hours and unfurling in a confined space bordered by prying neighbours and the audience, the result is a painful, passionate, and revealing exposé of how little can actually lie behind the facade of those seeming to live out the American Dream.

Joe is played by Len Cariou, a veteran Canadian actor of the stage and screen. He provides a sterling performance as the man who seems so friendly and cheery, yet who can suddenly change into an angry and domineering individual who is capable of cowing most who cross him. The honourable exception (as always!) is his good lady wife, tremendously played here by Barbara Brennan. Initially she appears as a fraught mother who so desperately misses her first born son that she seeks solace in the horoscopes of her foolish neighbour. Yet. her true nature becomes apparent over the course of the play and the strength of her resolve is something to behold.

The drama culminates in two powerful final scenes that are of breathless intensity. Indeed, the ending is the black hole that all great tragedies aspire to in terms of relentlessly drawing the audience in before crushing them as forcefully as they do the flawed figure at the centre of the piece.

On the whole, this is a highly impressive production from director Robin Lefèvre of one of Miller’s best plays. Its message for contemporary Ireland is acute enough to hurt. Indeed, the country’s political and business leaders of the past decade should be made to watch it until their eyes bleed.