''Outside Mullingar'' has many of the elements we have come to expect of Irish plays: rural gloom, family feuds, inheritance anxiety, rain, mud, depression and grimly eloquent humour. But it spares us the darker peat-bog horrors, and has a softer centre than most.
There are two adjacent farms and good reasons to amalgamate them but, people being what they are, this has not happened. One of the farmers is Tony, a plodder and dreamer who does his farm's work conscientiously and joylessly while harbouring an odd fantasy about his own identity. He's socially inept and emotionally clueless.
The other farmer, chain-smoking Rosemary, has an equally complex personality, her habitual, willed coldness giving way to explosiveness and warmth. Because of Tony's general ineptitude, it's left to her to do the hard, patient work of bringing the farms, and their owners, together.
Under Lisa Warrington's direction, Lara Macgregor (the Fortune's artistic director, in her first acting role on this stage) and Phil Vaughan, as Rosemary and Tony, display great rapport and sensitive balances of awkwardness and ease, tenderness and outrage.
They are strongly supported in the first scenes by Geraldine Brophy as Aoife, Rosemary's mother, and Simon O'Connor as Anthony, Tony's father.
Their function is to provide background to the obstacles Rosemary and Tony face as romance painfully and improbably takes hold, but they are also crustily and perversely entertaining characters in their own right.
The play provides a vehicle for four such finely nuanced performances. Accent training from Georgina Dowd has ensured believable Irish accents throughout.
In his introduction, playwright John Patrick Shanley writes, ''Life holds its miracles, good erupting from darkness chief among them.''
The audience's enthusiastic reception on Saturday night showed that we can all do with some of that.
- Barbara Frame
