FOLLOWING ITS highly successful versions of The Importance of Being Earnest and The World’s Wife, Mephisto Theatre Company is to stage Tom Murphy’s The Morning After Optimism at the Black Box in August.
This will be the first time Mephisto have staged one of the famed writer’s works and the first time they perform in the Black Box.
First performed in 1971, The Morning After Optimism is an epic fantasy set in a lush, mystical, forest featuring James and Rosie; a pimp and his whore, childlike characters who find themselves unable or unwilling to leave the surreal maze.
Deep within they discover the fairytale-esque duo Edmund and Anastasia who set in motion a rocketing exploration of innocence, illusion, and freedom. Critic Fintan O’Toole has described the work as “A play of a dream world...profoundly engaged with the archetypes of Western culture”.
On Monday afternoon after rehearsal’s Mephisto’s Emma O’Grady and Caroline Lynch meet up to talk about the play. Co-incidentally, the previous evening I had been at Propeller’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Murphy’s play can be viewed as an inversion of that play; it has a similar enchanted forest and meeting between mortals and other-worldly characters - though Murphy’s work ultimately leads to a darker outcome.
Caroline, who plays Rosie, acknowledges the similarity but observes: “I think this one is very different from what we usually consider a Tom Murphy play. There are no references to Ireland or Irishness, it’s in a kind of ‘no-place’.
“It’s quite a surreal piece. It’s part fairytale, part morality tale. There is one couple who are very pure and innocent and another older couple who are very corrupted and in the play they stay with each other but we really don’t know if they do that out of love or habit - they themselves don’t seem to know.
“What Murphy does very cleverly in the play is you never know what the truth is - everything the characters say is said with absolute conviction but then they will contradict each other or themselves in the very next scene.
“The play is between this modern world - as two of the characters are a pimp and whore - and the fairytale world - where you have this princess and a prince who comes to rescue her. And the language is not of any specific time, it’s like a stylised fairytale language.”
Emma, who plays Anastasia, adds “Murphy wrote the play soon after he moved to London in the 1960s and he was feeling all these sensations of exile and displacement and I think they feed into the work.
“I first read the play a year and a half ago when I found it in a second hand bookstore in Dublin. As soon I read it I thought we should do it as we had the people available to do the play. I’ll admit part of the attraction is that it has a small cast but we quickly learned that it’s certainly not a small show! There are large themes there, as is the case with so much of Tom Murphy’s work.”
Interestingly, Mephisto are doing the play without a designated director. How does that work?
“We’ve done a couple of shows without a director, such as The World’s Wife,” Lynch replies. “A lot of theatre comes from the input of the actors because they’re the ones who are up there onstage doing it.
“It’s a collaborative process - we all talk about sets and costumes etcetera. We will probably use a director again in our next show but this is working well for us so far. A show’s success depends largely on the chemistry of the people involved and you can have a show with a director that’s a flop because the chemistry isn’t right.”
The Morning After Optimism is Mephisto’s 11th production since they debuted in December 2006, an impressive track record by any standards. As well as O’Grady and Lynch, the cast features Duncan LaCroix as James and Bernard Higgins as Edmund.
The company has also received Arts Council funding to bring Murphy’s play to the Galway stage and it is to be hoped such support will prove to be ongoing in these economically troubled times.
In the meantime, The Morning After Optimism runs at the Black Box from Thursday August 13 to Saturday 15, at 8pm nightly. Funny, poetic, insane and ultimately heartbreaking, this tale of dreaming versus living is one you don’t want to miss.
Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
