The Patrick Pearse Motel (1975)
by Hugh Leonard
Directed by Leslie Lidyard
Performances: Sun 4th - Sat 10th May 1975, Theatre
Contents
Introduction
Text about the play
Cast
- Dermod Gibbon - John Lyne
- Grainee Gibbon - Ruth Shettle
- Fintan Kinnore - Dennis Packham
- Niamh Kinnore - Pam Lyne
- James Usheen - Brian Scoltock
- Miss Manning - Hazel Edwards
- Hoolihan - Charles Cheetham
Crew
The crew page of the programme has not been kept if you know any details please add.
- Stage Manager - SM Name
- Lighting Design - Designer Name
- Lighting Operator - Operator Name
Reviews
"We Were Not Amused"
After the last production, I had high hopes for their latest offering. So maybe it was my fault that I cam away disappointed - not at the acting but at the play.
The plot was shallow, the jokes predictable and the language a little bit strong when it needn't have been.
All farces risk becoming ridiculous and unfunny. This one has those misfortunes.
The author, Hugh Leonard, has been described as the latest in a line of Irish playwrights which runs Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, O'Casey.
(Uncredited newspaper.)
"Bed, Beauty and Blarney"
Perhaps it is only when the Irish laugh at themselves that we feel it right to laugh with them. And there is no contemporary Irish playwright with whom we laugh more heartily than Hugh Leonard.
His humour is deadly but quite without malice. He chides his people, like a fond but exasperated parent, for their deep religious conservatism and their obsessive reverence for national heroes.
Both themes are well to the fore in "The Patrick Pearse Motel", which is concerned with the desperately serious business of adultery in a land ruled by saints and martyrs.
The Christian names Demod, Grainne, Fintan, Niahm - are Hiberian to the core. The humour leaps out at us with unexpected variants of old cliches. "The night is still a pup!" exclaims Grainne, as she gleefully prepares for her first ever infidelity. The victim - he has to be a victim: it is one of the rules of Irishness - is a TV personality who has only to whistle for a bevy of beauties to come running.
But Mr Leonard, for all his rare qualities, is hardly a master of farce; and farce is the chosen convention of this play. The dashes in and out of bedrooms (all named after Irish heroes) are in the end self-defeating, a fact which the producer Leslie Lidyard, for all his careful plotting, did not mange to conceal.
I commend the production for its pace and its exuberant sense of fun, but it remains even though in the best sense, an imitation. The accents are commendable, but somehow not quite right. The nearest to authenticity is Dennis Packham's Fintan Kinnore, a riotously uxorious businessman moved to righteous anger when it seems his wife is two-timing him.
Gallery
Reminiscences and Anecdotes
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See Also
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References
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