Eye Weekly, January 20, 2005
Punch drunk
By: Steven English
Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark, Company Theatre troupe's inaugural production, is akin to a sucker punch in the jaw. Murphy's bare-knuckled glimpse into the hardscrabble world of the battlin' Carney clan -- a thuggish gang of Irish brothers and their irascible ringleader/father -- is an ugly portrait of a broken family. They are cruel, brutal, raw and mean, and these are their best qualities.
Loyalty and failure are the dominant themes in Whistle, with the typical pressures of strained familial relationships serving as an allegory for the tense minefield of Irish/English relations in the 1960s, the backdrop against which the play is set. Michael (Jonathan Goad), the eldest Carney brother and a pacifist, has traded in the poverty, ennui and aimless lager-lad violence of West Ireland for a semi-respectable blue-collar life in working-class England. Unfortunately, three of Michael's ne'er-do-well brothers have followed him across the Irish Sea and set up camp in his living room, bringing all of their nasty habits -- drinking, fighting, cursing, more fighting -- along with them. The misanthropic Carneys make Michael and his wife, Betty (Sarah Dodd), unwelcome in their own home, rewarding the couple's generosity with a battery of withering remarks, veiled threats and dead-eyed glares. Things get progressively worse when the Mulryans, a rival clan of �migr�s, challenge the Carneys to a no-holds-barred brawl, prompting DaDa (Joseph Ziegler) and littlest brother, Des (Philip Riccio), to turn up at Michael's door to shore up the side.
A palpable, unsettling sense of dread and impending disaster builds from the first scene forward. Director Jason Byrne does a masterful job in managing the incredible tension of the piece, pushing the characters to the brink, pulling back again and again at the last moment. Byrne's cast is top-notch, with Ziegler's performance as the blustery DaDa -- a failed, hard man who's convinced himself that raising the roughest, toughest sonsabitches in town constitutes good parenting -- standing out from an impressive pack. Even the Oirish accents are credible. All told, this is an impressive first production from a promising new company.