Tag Archives: Network Theatre

Stags

Stags

★★★★

Network Theatre

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Stags

Stags

Network Theatre

Reviewed – 17th May 2021

★★★★

 

“moves like a large truck—slow to get going, but once on the move—impossible to stop”

 

Cameron Corcoran’s Stags, presented by Off Main Stage Productions at the Network Theatre, Waterloo, is an intense, gritty drama exploring all the unfinished business between a dead father and his two sons. Younger son Tony (Blake Kubena) returns home to find his father (Da, played by Tim Molyneux) dead in an armchair and surrounded by broken furniture. Tony’s older brother Conn (James Finnegan), just released from prison, is nowhere in sight.

In sixty minutes, Stags covers familiar territory made famous in the dramas of American playwrights Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard, but Corcoran gives it a decidedly Irish twist by setting the play in Dublin. Stags is a pressure cooker play, always hovering on the edge of violence, no matter how much civility smart blue suit Tony attempts to bring back to the wreckage he left behind. For starters, he’s still renting space in his memories to the abuse he suffered from his father and brother, and possibly his mother as well. The first half of Stags deals with all that as Tony confronts his father’s corpse in a memory play. The two rekindle, in bitter recriminations, the wary circling around that characterized their relationship when Da was alive. But Da is dead and confined to his armchair, so the resentments on both sides simmer along without resolution until the second half when Conn returns home. By now we know enough about Conn (and the way Da has nurtured violence in the home) to know it is only a matter of time before the brothers come to blows.

Playwright Corcoran handles this material with confidence. Stags moves like a large truck—slow to get going, but once on the move—impossible to stop. It smashes everything in its path. The play is a great piece for actors, and it gives Molyneux, Finnegan and Kubena plenty to do. Molyneux is particularly impressive, since he has to work from that armchair. Finnegan deftly handles the promise of violence fulfilled as Conn goads his younger brother into shedding his veneer of education and civility. Kubena holds the play together with a difficult role that requires him to shift between playing nice and exploding into nasty. Director Naomi Wirthner uses the space economically, and well. This is a bare bones production that focuses on the acting, and rightly so.

If you have a taste for this kind of drama, you’ll find Stags well worth your time. The Network Theatre space can be a challenge to find, but keep searching even if the location seems unlikely. The space, and this play, are well suited to one another.

 

 

Reviewed by Dominica Plummer

 


Stags

Network Theatre until 22nd May

 

Reviewed this year by Dominica:
Public Domain | ★★★★ | Online | January 2021
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice | ★★★ | Online | February 2021
Adventurous | ★★½ | Online | March 2021
Tarantula | ★★★★ | Online | April 2021

 

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Lost Laowais

Lost Laowais

★★★

VAULT Festival 2020

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Lost Laowais

Lost Laowais

Network Theatre

Reviewed – 5th February 2020

★★★

 

“brimming with ideas that don’t feel as though they’ve fully come together”

 

There’s been much discussion lately around the contradiction of Brexiteers who, fed up with foreigners in the UK, are also indignant at the suggestion Brexit may impact their ability to live abroad. This largely unexamined difference between ‘immigrants’ and ‘expats’ is at the heart of David East’s Lost Laowais.

Directed by Tian Brown-Sampson, the play follows the intertwining lives of four expats in Beijing. Julian (East) has a Cambridge degree in Oriental Studies, and is finding it difficult to admit his love of China is unrequited. Lisa (Siu-See Hung) is a British woman of Chinese heritage. She doesn’t speak Chinese, and is quickly finding the country unwelcoming to those who don’t. Robert (Joseph Wilkins), a celebrated British writer who has lived in China for more than twenty years, has learned the many reasons it can never be a real home for foreigners. Ollie (Waylon Luke Ma) is the teenage son of a diplomat, who relocates with his family every few years. All four of them are outsiders. All four of them are lonely.

Lost Laowais brings forward timely ideas about belonging and multicultural identities, but misses the mark with an uneven script and some unpolished staging. Although East faithfully portrays a pretentious Oxbridge expat, the dialogue often feels stilted. The characters’ interactions could do with smoothing. Choppy scenes broken by slightly clumsy transitions, shuffling chairs and tables in the dark, are not aided by awkward sound cues (Liam Mercer) – whether ambient noise or music – which cut off partway through both the scenes and transitions.

There’s groundwork for some intriguing material about expats as voluntary exiles, but the script doesn’t quite manage to make us care about Julian and Robert as much as we need to. The play is strongest when it focuses on Lisa’s perspective. The granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, she snaps at Julian when he suggests he’s an immigrant too. She reminds him he makes more money than his Chinese colleagues, and that he moved to Beijing because he was bored, not out of desperation for a better life. Lisa’s experience of being caught between two cultures, and feeling cut off from the country of her heritage by language especially, is more compelling than the somewhat predictable romantic storyline she’s given.

In the days following Brexit, it’s a good moment to take a hard look at British expats. This is a show brimming with ideas that don’t feel as though they’ve fully come together.

 

Reviewed by Addison Waite

 

VAULT Festival 2020

 

 

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