FringeReview UK 2026
Wife to James Whelan
Jermyn Street Theatre and Mint Theater
Genre: classical, Comedic, Costume, Drama, Feminist Theatre, Fringe Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre
Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Largely forgotten till recently, the once-celebrated Teresa Deevy’s career shrank to the radio after her champion the Abbey rejected Wife to James Whelan in 1937. New York’s Mint Theater revived it in 2010. Again directed by Jonathan Bank, but with an Irish cast, it plays at Jermyn Street Theatre till July 25.
It should transfer, though nothing can beat this space for delivery. Outstanding, a must-see if ever there was one.
Review
It’s not so often you see a two-hours-fifteen eight-strong cast outside a larger theatre. Jermyn Street as ever defies both gravity and lateral dimensions. And this is the major classic play of the summer. Largely forgotten till recently, the once-celebrated Teresa Deevy’s career shrank to the radio after her champion the Abbey rejected Wife to James Whelan in 1937. New York’s Mint Theater revived it in 2010; in 2011 it arrived at the New Diorama. Again directed by Jonathan Bank, but with an Irish cast, it plays at Jermyn Street Theatre till July 25.
Bank’s latest revival is possibly the greatest production of a work that’s gained a huge reputation. And it’s possibly the finest Irish play of the 1930s, unless it’s another Deevy play like Reapers or Katie Roche. The title, skewing women’s aspirations to anonymity – under the name of a man – is a challenge in itself. It seems mild till the play unfolds.
A drystone wall and a whirl of briefly lounging figures come and go. It’s initially 1930: an Ireland slowly embracing the new, including (later) the motor-coach business. Everyone’s waiting to see which local man will be chosen for a major job, but no-one’s betting against James Whelan (Fiach Kunz), who hasn’t yet appeared.
Early on, there’s a touch of the sports scene in The Playboy of the Western World; where Christy Mahon dominates offstage. Deevy here (and in a later offstage fight-scene) perhaps pays witty homage yet puts Synge firmly back in a plain wooden box.
Warm-hearted and perceptive older Tom Carey (Patrick McBrearty) joshes with saturnine Bill McGafferty (Darragh Feehely, tensed to pounce) who’s palpably jealous of James. McBrearty and Feehely set the naturalistic tone, the flex and unflexing of social drives and tensions. Nan Bowers (Clíona Flynn) is James’ sweetheart – or she’s told she is, though Tom’s wiser. It’s expected Nan will wait for James if he’s called away.
Flynn’s ambivalence is memorable, and she comes across as someone smouldering, shadowing her feelings, testing James above all for his responses. From the off you sense Flynn’s Nan is both attracted to and repelled by James. Being the local catch – and it does play like that – Nan is expected to take the young cock-of-the-walk. Later though, they’re both hardened. This just seems to intensify feelings. Only now choices are staked the other way.
Nan initially has plans of her own. And before James appears Jack McClinsey (Benjamin Reilly) – sensitive, quiet and physically not strong – displays qualities James patently proves he lacks. Including thinking for others. Reilly can only briefly soft-stamp his memorably unentitled Jack, and lingers in the mind. Kate Moran (an alert, wry but quietly heartbreaking Eavan Gaffney) looks on watchfully. She too has feelings for James, but knows her place: to give good counsel.
It’s a play where physical mobility – moving away but not migrating – is subtly spliced with social mobility. What James wins in his exile to Dublin (initially) is a chance to direct a burgeoning motor-coach business. His transformation from the blowy-haired lad from the country to the sleek-backed, hard businessman of 1937 is visceral. Shout out for Anett Black’s costumes which transform several actors in a jump of seven years. Acts Two and Three run on almost without a break and the interval’s unusually placed after just forty minutes.
Outward cockiness is gone as Kunz hardens into command, showing James easy in this: generous if unrelenting. Other characters are drawn back to his orbit. Tom works for him, as does Kate and her young now grown brother Apollo Moran (David Rawle, comically callow), twittering with outer-office status and wittily punctilious – and silly – about his role. Bill is a coach-business rival James can take out without needing to make a more than a good offer. That will rankle, Tom warns.
And now there’s newly-rich Nora Keane (Molly Hanly, kittenish with entitlement), whose from-nothing father appreciates James, as she does. But there’s also a young widow, Nan. Who arrives desperately seeking work. The contrast between the leisured Nora and the visibly impoverished Nan covered in a shawl, marks out not so much that one is trying mobility and the other aspires to a traditional good match; but that both live within old bounds. Only Kate, shrewd office (and James) manager, without hopes of marriage, makes a virtue of her necessity.
An Irish playwright who became deaf at 19, Deevy shows an unerring instinct for dialogue and Chekhovian narrative, inflected with a preternatural instinct for people’s unpredictability. There’s one moment at the end of Act Two that stretches this to shock. Deevy though knows how to pace everything. Even with the drawn-out Act Three, with its pure Lopakhin/Varya moment, there’s a twist.
Deevy’s play never stretches propriety. There’s no need for an intimacy director, a Q&A later quipped. But feelings simmer and this cast make you ache: particularly Flynn and Kunz. However in an increasingly conservative Irish theatre this simmering, and themes of mobility, desire, venal reasons for marriage and imprisonment, were enough to frighten off the Abbey. It ended Deevy’s fruitful relationship and marked a turning-back for all.
Neil Irish’s design is a miraculous world made cunningly. It’s set initially outside a cottage in the first act, with stonewall effects and bright skies under a green painted wood flanking brick. Lit by Chris McDonnell who modulates exterior with later interior, and Jane Shaw’s wash of folk-music, this all hardens into an office interior: replete with period desk and furniture. And laminated Deco-style coach posters the self-appointed style-guru young Apollo keeps putting up and James removes. Irish’s gleaming solidity echoes production values everywhere. And in this intimate space everything can be heard, allowing naturalism to flow more than in a large theatre.
Like Chekhov, the feelings evoked by period dilemmas and constraints seem all too resonant. A man already snared by ambition has to balance feeling with advantage. But the passage of years also informs softenings as well as hardening. You want them to ache in the right meeting; whereas before James palpably needed to learn something. But has he, and is it right we all want things to change? Deevy teases with the way our investment in characters makes us urge with them, when perhaps we see circumstance rather an instinct might also have a hand. And yet…
Flynn and Kunz triumph in their shuddering stand-off. Every cast-member is given their moment, and more. It’s a work mostly generous to its eight cast-members. With eddies of comedy and confrontation, shifting sympathies from Kate and Tom as well as Apollo, and the eruption of Bill, there’s a rich play living on in its own subconscious. It’s tempting to call this great. And it’s certainly a great production. It should transfer, though nothing can beat this space for delivery. Outstanding, a must-see if ever there was one.
Casting Director Sarah Jones, Fight Director Enric Ortuno, Assistant Director Gus Hodgson, Production Manager Thomas J. Quine, Stage Manager Lisa Cochrane, ASM Madeleine Lawless. Photo Credit Alex Brenner.
