Theatre review: After Luke
Cork's newest theatre company makes its mark with 'After Luke', part two of Cónal Creedon's Second City Trilogy. It's a bright if uneven debut.
The parable of the prodigal son is an ancient tale of loss and redemption between a father and his two sons; with the role of the father signifying God, the elder son an honest way of life and the younger son representing the lost soul or sinner.
In Cónal Creedon’s darkly comic retelling of this story ‘After Luke’, God happens to be an avid bingo player, whose eldest son keeps hens and fixes broken down cars, while his youngest son dreams of making lots of easy money and getting with some even easier “Soho sluts”.
Suffice to say then, the three protagonists are a quirky family unit, living somewhere on the northside of Cork city in and around the start of the Celtic Tiger. And with no mother figure present, the two sons fight like a pair of starved animals over the few scraps of food thrown to them by their owner. Except in this case, the scraps are emotional tidbits as Sonny and Maneen have to vie for the attention and understanding of their closed off Dadda.
This latest staging of part two of Creedon’s ‘Second City Trilogy’ by Cork’s newest theatre company Lost in the Canon, certainly nails the comic elements of the script. Mike O’Dowd is hilarious as the peacekeeping father who paradoxically is never too far from blowing a gasket and only ever says what he means when caught in a fit of rage.
Niall Holland gives a very sweet performance as the chicken loving halfwit Sonny, while Simon McKeon tries his best to inflate Maneen, the ultimate small man, and make him appear much bigger than he ever possibly could be.
When Maneen departs from home with a wad of cash from his father in his back pocket and his head filled with grand designs of taking over London, he quickly falls on hard times. It doesn’t take long for the harsh realities of life in the big city to dawn on him and when the money he had to begin with inevitably runs out, he decides to return to his hometown of Cork, which turns out to be changed completely on his return.
Apartments are springing up all over the city, there’s a waft of cappuccinos in the air and he senses an opportunity to make the money at home that he failed to get a hold of in London, by trying to convince his father to sell their property while prices are sky high.
At times the transitions between the different locations in this production are a little clunky and the action doesn’t flow as smoothly as it should. Visually, bar two platforms and two boxes, the set design has been kept to a minimum, which is fine for the most part as the character’s costumes and speech fill in the blanks left by the almost open stage, but perhaps the chicken shed could’ve been given more attention as it would have created a few more varying levels had it been elevated higher.
The sound design by Cormac O’ Connor makes great use of the cackling of hens and features a nice selection of songs to highlight the rural idyll of the world inhabited by Dadda and Sonny, however, the choice of a jazz track to aid Maneen’s scheming seems a bit misplaced. The character of Maneen is nowhere near suave enough to carry this off, as his notions far outweigh his ability to fulfill his dreams and this soundtrack didn’t really fit with the overall mood of the play.
But for all the wonderful moments of levity in ‘After Luke’, the dramatic elements are a tad heavy handed. The mother’s backstory seems like something that is stitched onto the story and doesn’t really inform the behaviour of the individual characters. Despite this, director Leon Danza does well to make ‘After Luke’ as light hearted and enjoyable as possible, but once the action reaches a crescendo towards the end, the story lags a little and peters out to a conclusion unbefitting of the betrayal it had been leading up to.
‘After Luke’ is a solid worthwhile debut effort from all involved, with O’ Dowd in particular a source of great mirth.
‘After Luke’ runs every evening at 8pm at the Cork Arts Theatre until Saturday October 13. For more information and tickets please see here.