Colleen McShane reviews Tom Creed’s contemporary revival production of Brendan Behan’s play The Quare Fellow.
To kick off the new year, The Abbey Theatre in Dublin revived Brendan Behan’s Irish classic play The Quare Fellow (1956). This performance integrated Irish twentieth-century social subversiveness with a nuanced outlook on modern gender and sex politics. The show ran from November 24th to January 27th and made an interesting winter evening at The Abbey Theatre. Considering Behan’s play was initially turned down by the Abbey and brought to premiere at the Pike Theatre Club in 1954 instead, the Abbey Theatre commemorated a century since Brendan Behan’s birthday in 1923 with this production. Directed by Tom Creed, the ‘tragicomic’ play follows the mundane realities within the interior structure of an all-male Irish prison in the 1950s, where corporal and capital punishments, like the death penalty, remained heavily ingrained in said structures. The play depicts different age groups and generational divides contrasted with opposing archetypes of traditional masculinities and their different roles within the prison system, ranging from inmates to guards. With the added layer of physical comedy and careful politicism, Tom Creed’s revival of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow has been a much enjoyed experience that leaves one with many political, societal, and cultural evaluatory questions, as Behan’s original play would’ve done for mid-twentieth century Irish audiences.
In the original text, Behan examines social, profoundly gendered, stereotypes and the intersection of manhood through genre hybridity, also known as the tragicomedy. Creed captures Behan’s original reference to stereotypes, queerness, and themes of otherness by casting female and non-binary actors to play a variety of these contrasting male figures, from 1950s Irish nationalists to British identities. This casting choice defies said social stereotypes while also questioning them. For this reason, the revival production uses drag, and in particular, the drag king art form to establish and question these gendered boundaries for a contemporary audience. The drag king art form sees a woman or AFAB (assigned female at birth) nonbinary individual dress as a male character for entertainment purposes. Irish costume designer Breege Fahy, was consulted about the nuances of the drag king art form. Her work on set included providing with an insight into the drag king art form and what it actually means for them to “carry themselves in their new persona” and how to distinguish their performance from “the status, privilege and point of view that a male character may possess”.
The revival production uses drag, and in particular, the drag king art form to establish and question gendered boundaries for a contemporary audience.
Beyond the most obvious alterations to their physical appearances through makeup and hair design, drag was conveyed on The Abbey Theatre stage through purposeful bodily movements and changes in vocal tone with an acute attention to the importance of gender fluidity on the modern stage.
The set designs magnetism comes from its eye-catching mimicry of a blank canvas which further emphasises the claustrophia and isolation Irish identities were subjected to inside the 1950s Irish prison wards. With its stark white doors and blood red numbered splattered accross, the representation of prison cells is both jarring and all-encompassing for the audience. Overall, a haunting vacancy was present which reflects the unsettling themes and anxieties of corporal punishment and the ethical dilemmas associated with it, both now and then. However, the most striking set choice one should consider is the background and the ways in which Creed structures the titular character behind the audience and emphasises his "quareness" through a careful direction of his actor's line of sight and the almost, three-dimensional, use of sound. True to his identity as the ‘the quare fellow’, he never actually appears on stage before or after his execution. Instead, his haunting voice is heard, through songs, from behind the audience in a way that effectively haunts, allures, and unsettles. The song, sung also by a female actor, was the Irish folk ballad “The Auld Triangle” which features in Behan’s original play, however, is much more effective when sung as opposed to when it is simply read.
The set designs magnetism comes from its eye-catching mimicry of a blank canvas which further emphasises the claustrophia and isolation Irish identities were subjected to inside the 1950s Irish prison wards
The appeal of Tom Creed’s production of The Quare Fellow stems from its sharp, witty commentary on the Irish political, cultural, and its understanding of post-war morale. The production is rooted in its subversive, profoundly gendered reinvention of the perception of ‘quare’ and queer identities in modern structures. Creed’s revival is an interesting and reformative evaluation of the original play which takes into consideration the importance of transgressing social norms, queerness in the twenty-first century, and inventive theatre all through appearances, set design, body language, and drag.