Timmy (John Keating, left) and his sister May (Maeve Higgins) sort through their father’s pills in Kevin Barry’s Autumn Royal at the Irish Repertory Theatre.
There’s a moment early in Kevin Barry’s darkly comic Autumn Royal, currently running at the Irish Rep under the direction of Ciarán O’Reilly, when siblings May (Maeve Higgins) and Timmy (John Keating), both in their 30s in Cork city, Ireland, realize that the current predicament of caring for their psychotic, decrepit, slowly dying father might have no end in sight.
May: I mean his last set o’ bloods?
Timmy: They were bloomin’ textbook, May!
May: I mean all things considered?
Timmy: He’s as fit as a bee above!
May: He’s like a butcher’s dog above.
Timmy: There could be years in this, May!
May: Decades, Timmy!
Timmy: What are we goin’ to do, May?
It seems as though the play is about to take a patricidal turn. But the moment passes (for now), and their grim day-to-day routine continues. Ultimately this is a play about inaction, about May and Timmy’s inability, quite simply, to live their lives: “We’re never going to get past ourselves here,” May hauntingly says to her brother.
Timmy takes notes, trying to plan his future life in Australia in financial services.
This sense of entrapment is illuminated by Charlie Corcoran’s set design: a cramped room with bare walls and a table and two chairs, the “sense” of a window and a door that leads to a stairway. Above is the father’s room, but the audience never sees him—there are only occasional rumblings that cause dust and bits of the ceiling to tumble down. The only words that are heard from upstairs are the first line of a poem the father is composing: “A duck walk across a puddle.”
The household routine, as described in both dialogue between the two characters and in alternating monologues, seems to be that Timmy talks to the father or reads from the newspaper in the mornings and evenings, while May, less squeamish, handles the bathing. The father particularly delights in hearing about old acquaintances, “especially if they’re dead,” and about car crashes: “Man critical after collision, Ballyvourney, and the little eyes light up in the father’s head.”
Timmy clings to a pipe dream worthy of Harry Hope’s No-Chance Saloon: he’ll be moving to Australia, he insists, to become a surfer with a lucrative job in financial services, with a blonde wife and two children acquired somehow along the way. May doesn’t harbor the same kind of delusions and seems to exist in a near-constant state of aggrieved agitation: “all of my life stopped dead in this place,” she says. She and Timmy observe the neighbors from their house on top of the hill and offer ruthless commentary, especially on their appearance. But it is the very judgment of those neighbors that the siblings agonize over after their father escapes in humiliating fashion from the Autumn Royal nursing home they placed him in after a quick scan of the Yellow Pages: “There’s lepers more popular, Timmy,” May comments about their current status in the neighborhood.
The long-ago abandonment of May and Timmy by their mother is intended to be the incident that haunts the play. The first image after the lights go down is the silhouette of a woman in the doorway, and we learn that she “went out for a packet o’ Birds custard” many years before, and never came back. The family history of grievance and trauma is teased out in the monologues, which are accompanied by impressionistic projections on the walls that are sometimes more distracting than illuminating.
Timmy and May take a moment to dance to a song playing on the boom box. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
O’Reilly’s direction is elegantly straightforward, and Higgins’s and Keating’s impeccable performances allow the production to successfully navigate the play’s sometimes surreal touches without descending into farce. They are both expert comic actors, and their timing and cadences, combined with Barry’s rhythmic dialogue and novelistic descriptions, create a wonderfully sustained atmosphere of melancholy comedy with touches of the absurd. (I recommend studying the glossary of Irish terms provided in the online program, or some of the jokes and references might be confusing.) But the story of the mother’s abandonment and possible return is handled clumsily and doesn’t quite amount to a revelation, leaving the play adrift without a climax, and without the needed emotional weight. At a slim 70 minutes, Autumn Royal is highly enjoyable—an odd word to use for such dark material—but it strives to be more than that and doesn’t quite make it.
Autumn Royal runs through Nov. 21 at the Irish Repertory Theatre (132 W 22nd St.). Evening performances are at 8 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday; matinees are at 3 p.m. on Wednesday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. on Sunday. For tickets, information, and pandemic attendance guidelines, visit irishrep.org.
