Police are investigating whether a car in which three 13-year-old boys were killed and four other boys were badly injured crashed because it was carrying too many passengers. Officers are waiting to interview the middle-aged driver of the five-seat hatchback, which had the seven boys in it when she lost control. I don't know if first-night nerves had got to Courtenay, but I've rarely heard speeches chopped up in such a pointlessly mannered way. It seems that both within the play and surrounding it, everyone has seen better days To 27 August (0870 060 6637). But this piece, for all that it opens a window on a fascinating moment in Anglo-Irish relations,
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strikes me as a mix of second-best Friel and second-hand Chekhov.Fifteen years ago, Adrian Noble directed one of the most perceptive versions ever of Three Sisters, but this handsomely designed production from Dublin's Gate Theatre of The Home Place is not up to his usual Chekhovian (or in this case neo-Chekhovian) standards. Christopher has just returned from a memorial service for a tyrannical landowner who'd been battered to death The title is ironic and ambiguous. Christopher feels doubly exiled - both from the memory of his Kentish birthplace and from his adoptive country where, in addition to having to cope with the new political threat, he finds himself competing with his son for the love of Derbhle Crotty's beautiful young housekeeper.At his best (as in Faith Healer), there are few contemporary dramatists who can touch Friel."Fake mobile chemical weapons laboratories, that's OK; but windsurfing, that's where the American people draw the line.". "The trees, the doomed trees," cries the Tom Courtenay character in Brian Friel's new play, The Home Place Here's a man who knows his Chekhov, you might think. Except that this is County Donegal in 1878 and The Cherry Orchard is still 26 years away. He's translated several of the plays, adapted some of the short stories, and even granted a couple of the Russian writer's characters a theatrical after-life in a sequel. But the Chekhovian echoes are sometimes too blatant in this latest piece, and the material feels, on occasion, as if it's being forced into preordained patterns.The Home Place treats us to a day in the life of a widowed, paternalistic English landlord, Christopher Gore (played by Courtenay). We encounter him at a time when an agricultural depression is inciting the tenants to rebel.
He stole the title, he admits, from Roy Orbison, then goes on to explain how he once met The Big O, who told him he'd just written a song about windsurfing. "That's not gonna fly," he thought, adding that it was probably windsurfing that lost John Kerry the last election. Strumming an electric guitar languidly, he observes, "The Flintstones couldn't be made today - it's too controversial, that whole prehistoric setting. Not to mention the homosexual undertones between Fred and Barney." On finishing the song, he proclaims, "We've come a long way - and we're going back!".He is still fiercely committed to liberal-left causes, and even manages to bring a political bite to his introduction to "Leah", one of the new album's love songs. "The first stage is where you're the benevolent hand of God," he explains "The second, you're a tolerable idiot.