FOLLOWING HOT on the heels of their box office smash, Sunday Morning Coming Down, Truman Town Theatre returns to the Town Hall with another darkly hilarious play, Shortcut to Hallelujah, written and directed, like its predecessor, by Mick Donnellan.
Shortcut to Hallelujah is set during the run up to the All-Ireland Football final. Mayo are playing Kerry and the clientele of Quinn’s Bar, Ballinrobe are certain the Sam McGuire is coming West at last. There is only one problem. Rumours begin to surface of a curse on the team. The last time Mayo won they celebrated so loudly that they upset a tinker’s funeral and it was decreed that they would never win again until everyone on the team was dead. It is now over 50 years later and only one of the players remains alive. Meanwhile, young Chris McGuire is in a bitter dispute with local landgrabber Black Tom Tully. The argument dates back to an incident with McGuire's father some years before. A land deal went wrong when Tully was accused of refusing to buy his round of brandy and the two men became sworn enemies ever after. Chris has inherited the quarrel and is adamant that Tom Tully won't get a "...blade of grass..." Eimear, played by the beautiful Kate McCarthy, is the tragic fiancee of Chris. Despite her best efforts, she cannot reconcile herself to a life in Ballinrobe but her attempts to leave always prove more difficult than she imagined.
Over a post-rehearsal chat, writer-director Mick Donnellan talked about his new play, beginning with an account of how it came about; “After doing Sunday Morning Coming Down I was invited to submit a 10-minute play excerpt to the Jolt theatre festival in the Town Hall studio,” he reveals. “I wrote the first scene of Shortcut to Hallelujah specifically for that and we got our cast together to do it and they all enjoyed it and we worked well together so that gave me the impetus to carry on with the script.”
He expands on the play’s thematic concerns; “I wanted to look at the rural Irish pub and the things that go on there and the relationships there, like between the owner Seamus Quinn and Doc there is a kind of brotherly relationship even though Quinn is so cantankerous and Doc is so simple, but Quinn kind of adopts him and will give him a drink or advice about how to look when going to dole office, stuff like that. So there’s little things like that and it all becomes a family in a way. There is so much bitterness between Chris Maguire and Black Tom yet they frequent the pub together, they just sit on opposite sides with Seamus Quinn as a kind of referee between them.”
As with Sunday Morning Coming Down, Shortcut to Hallelujah offers a grimly humorous depiction of a milieu of heavy drinkers but, where the earlier play was set in the domestic sphere of a family home, this one is in the public sphere of Quinn’s bar. It is also a much more male-dominated world than the earlier play, with Chris’s girlfriend Eimear being the only notable female presence.
“It is quite a male world portrayed in the play though that’s true of a lot of those kind of rural pubs,” Donnellan observes. “What I was trying to do was merge a modern world where you have people in their 20s or 30s go to places like Australia because they want to travel or work and that older life where you had people leaving because they had to. Then you have people who stay, like Chris Maguire. He’s drinking himself into oblivion. Eimear is a symbol of what’s going on, she’s such a nice girl, she’s intelligent, is educated and has ambition and would like to go away. But she is attached to Chris – he’s also intelligent but has no intention of leaving so there is that marked contrast between them. I think a lot of people will be able to identify with Eimear’s situation, there are plenty of people that find themselves in dead-end relationships that they feel obliged to stick with for one reason or another. She’s torn.”
It is striking how many of the denizens of Quinn’s pub evince scant regard for the rules of polite society; Chris has no car insurance, Black Tom has no licence for his shotgun and is brazenly grazing his sheep on Maguire’s land, Quinn has rigged the fruit machine in the pub so that it won’t pay out. “They’re kind of underground characters, it’s a hell in a way,” Donnellan notes. “There’s a class thing there as well, you have Quinn’s Pub where everything seems to be left over or neglected and you have the two most civilised characters, Eimear and Gerry, a law student, who spend a lot of their time in the other village pub, Maloney’s, so there’s a proletariat/bourgeois divide between the two pubs. It’s something Chris is very aware of so you have him giving out about the bigshots for instance.”
The cast of Shortcut to Hallelujah features Cathal Leonard as Chris Maguire, Sean O’Maille as Black Tom, and Kate McCarthy as Eimear. Also featured are PJ Moore, Conor Geoghegan, Darren Killeen (who has just been cast in Game of Thrones ), Conor McDonagh Flynn, Michelle Henson and Mike O’Connor.
The play runs at the Town Hall studio from Monday, August 29 to Saturday, September 3, at 8.30pm nightly.
