Ottawa XPress, November 24, 2005
Rags to reconciliation
By: Jennifer Ball
At the least, Irish playwright Marie Jones's play Stones in His Pockets is a flippant, delightful poke in the ribs of the Hollywood machine.
At its best, its parlance captures the levelling effect that inhospitable social situations can have on the hopes and dreams of individuals.
Set in a small rural Irish community not dissimilar to her home, Jones imbues the play with a humouring insouciance, one that is perhaps in reaction to her own experience as an actor in films shot in Ireland, including the respectable 1993 Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle In the Name of the Father.
Here she works up the contrast between brash Hollywood types and locals, who can nary afford the price of film admission, by including a touching narrative about the suicide of a local lad whose funeral the film extras are forced to miss in an effort to keep the film on budget.
These callous Tinseltown types and a whole host of others are spirited onto the stage by the characters of two extras working on the film production: Jake Quinn (the Stratford veteran Jonathan Goad) and Charlie Conlon (Ottawa-based actor and writer Pierre Brault).
"Jake and Charlie, and of course Sean - the boy who commits suicide -all have visions of stardom," Goad lets on, "but when they look at their own life this becomes very unrealistic."
Both of them get caught up in the desire for celebrity, or as Goad describes it "the life of fame and riches," but they are quickly brought back down to earth by other characters on the set whose auras and shortcomings simply strengthen their sense of futility.
Included in this category are Caroline Giovanni, a completely untalented but glamorous movie star not above a few love affairs with the locals, and the soused Old Mickey, who is still living off his glory days as an extra on Graham Greene's The Quiet Man, some 50-odd years later.
In portraying them and 13 others, Brault and Goad unveil Jones's skill in creating chewy and ripe Irish patois that belies the men's confusion when they try to reconcile the excesses of celebrity with their own ambitions.
"They are either going to be stuck in a depression cycle, where they have to let go of the hopes and dreams that they might have had as young men, or they can take this as an opportunity to go beyond what their limitations are," Goad has decided.
STONES IN HIS POCKETS
THE GREAT CANADIAN THEATRE COMPANY
NOVEMBER 24 TO DECEMBER 11
TIX: $31 AND $34