Brighton Fringe 2024
Magpie
pigs_back_productions
Genre: Drama, Fringe Theatre, Historical, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Theatre, Tragedy
Venue: Lantern Theatre, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
“It’s when a young man is angry, those in power put him to their uses.” This really has no place in the Brighton Fringe. Perhaps the Festival. What is a slice of the darkest Sean O’Casey doing at a 9pm slot? Andrew Cusack’s three-hander Magpie in which he also acts, is directed by another actor Ronan Colfer at the Lantern Theatre, Brighton till May 9th.
This really has no place in the Brighton Fringe. Perhaps the Festival. What is a slice of the darkest Sean O’Casey doing at a 9pm slot? Outstanding.
Written by Andrew Cusack, Directed by Ronan Colfer, Set Design and Costume Design by the Cast, Lighting and Sound Direction Ciaran McIntyre, Production Stage and Tech Designer Erin Burbridge.
Till May 9th
Review
“It’s when a young man is angry, those in power put him to their uses.” This really has no place in the Brighton Fringe. Perhaps the Festival. What is a slice of the darkest Sean O’Casey doing at a 9pm slot? Andrew Cusack’s three-hander Magpie in which he also acts, is directed by another actor Ronan Colfer at the Lantern Theatre, Brighton till May 9th.
It says a lot for the Lantern it’s attracting so many fine shows.
1923, Ireland. Michael Murphy (Andrew Cusack) lies on a straw pallet in a room with a notably rimmed chamber pot, and little else save more straw and a wall he marks off with chalk stripes. He’ss imprisoned and ill.
An officer arrives. Michael’s jailor is his eldest (and only surviving) brother. Patrick Murphy (Johnjoe Irwin). An activist of the 1916 Dublin uprising where he led his younger brother Diarmuid to his death unwittingly, Patrick’s a victorious officer of the Irish Free State, who signed a treaty with the British, and beat the die-hard Republicans in the subsequent civil war.
Irwin’s brooding but not brutal performance is kerned with questions he bites off: you can see him think out Patrick’s mix of elder-brother authority and a slowly-breaking carapace of family solicitude and sheer bafflement.
It draws nuances from the almost uniformly hostile Michael, who in Cusack’s hands alternates between monologues when alone, radiant with self-knowledge. “I’m here and I deserve to be.”. And less enlightened, mocking, sometimes hilarious encounters with brother and a priest.
He has to pronounce sentence on Michael, who joined the British army, returned after two years’ war to ostracism, then joined the “extreme” Republicans who opposed compromise. And incidentally, ordered to do so, blew the back of a head off a good family friend Tommy at a christening, but for some reason didn’t shoot his brother.
Teasing out that reason and what Patrick has to do now is interrupted by fights, recriminations, desperate please for answers and reconciliations of a sort. Yet Michael’s answers are equivocal, shot through with a poetry that his brother can’t fathom: “Do you know what it feels like to be letters melting on a headstone in the rain?”
Patrick ripostes that Michael is no iconic Padraic Pearse (a schoolteacher also a poet “coming into his force” as Yeats put it) and union-organiser James Connolly from Glasgow, both shot in1916. Michael’s just murdered a friend at a christening. No heroics, just more killing, like France. He seems hell-bent, with his racking cough, on starving himself. Even his mother’s bread can’t reach him.
Michael’s not alone though. There’s a magpie outside. In Ciaran McIntyre’s superb sound and lighting, we’re introduced to Jamie, as light shifts. “One for sorrow” and that magpie never goes away. Jamie’s a magpie now, but might have been – for Michael – a 16-year-old boy who should never have been at the front.
What happens to him haunts Michael, and radicalises him more than many who jeer as he returns as a British ‘collaborator’ spat on and re-traumatised: as if his PTSD or ‘shell-shock’ hadn’t pushed him far enough. That’s when those in power find him useful.
There’s more respite, but of an equivocal kind: Father Diarmuid Kelly (Ronan Colfer) is here to absolve Michael, who’s teasing and taunts Kelly back with a young woman he knows he knew long ago. Kelly denies it, but finally admits to his terrible experiences: “As a man I don’t feel anything any more. How Could I?”
Colfer almost emits the man breaking through the priest, and indeed his conflict is heightened for some who’d note his resemblance to Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins at this point. Colfer’s almost trembling attempt to wrestle with another’ conscience to salve his own is equally compelling here.
Despite this, Michael’s action again is hilarious and – to some – shocking. Outraged, Patrick redoubles his scorn and some effort to break through. ”We pick sides sticking so far to their truth.” He reflects, but asks again why Michael didn’t follow through on something else.
“All those orders I followed. I couldn’t follow another one.” Cusack’s performance rises to even greater heights here, startling in tis revelation and indeed the cycle of following and not following orders is as complex as anything in O’Casey or indeed Sophocles. It’s echoed by Patrick who doesn’t feel he can carry out another either.
The cast’s universally outstanding. Several possible ends suggest themselves, but not the one you’ll see in this one-hour play that covers as much as a far longer one, and feels longer, in exactly the right way. Never has “Two for Joy” proved so devastating an utterance as here. Outstanding.
