No Romance: A Desperate Business
John Cronin and Clara Fitzgerald in No Romance. Image uncredited
***
Not for the first, or last time has a modest production been elevated by its superior cast. Nancy Harris’s moderately amusing, No Romance: A Desperate Business, being a case in point. Like a pilot for a TV series, it offers a preliminary set up promising more to come. Only nothing more comes. Joe, a belligerent, blowhard beta male blusters to hide his brokenness. A failed businessman, son, husband and father, Joe is confronted by a string of mother, virgin and whore archetypes. The wounded Joe too gullible to see that yes, he’s an idiot with Mammy issues and secret fantasies, but Harris’s gender dice were loaded from the start. Still, the jokes are often funny, even if they disguise a plethora of clichéd sins.
Beginning with Joe’s judgemental and recently deceased mother, whose body rests in the smallest coffin imaginable at a funeral home. Designer Ronán Duffy suggesting they were in a hurry to get home so made do with a Moses basket. Waiting for the mourners to arrive, husband and wife, Joe and Carmel, need to clear the air about some things. Or rather the wage earning, moderately racist Carmel does. Yet another mother disappointed in Joe. Meanwhile the virgin, their 22 year old daughter, is posting pictures online of her wet t-shirt competitions in Australia much to Joe’s hypocritical chagrin. Elsewhere, the whore transpires to be Abbi with an I, who mails intimate items of clothing she’s worn for a modest fee. Throw in double standards, ambush arguments, secret emails and a sexy Nigerian taxi driver and it all trots along nicely till Harris bails midway leaving the audience in the middle of nowhere.
Feeling unfinished, No Romance: A Desperate Business is amusing more than funny, its martial relationship full of stereotypical, smart wife, dumb male tropes. In fairness, it's an isolated piece from a triptych of three short plays which had their Irish premiere in The Abbey in 2011 and whose juxtaposition might offer richer interpretations. Even so, director Ellen Buckley mines the married couple comedy for all it’s worth. Buckley eliciting two terrific performances from an excellent Clara Fitzgerald as a wife reclaiming herself and her life and a stupendously brilliant John Cronin, who risks cornering the market in weak-willed, boy men following a similarly brilliant turn in ANU’s The Dead.
Just as Carmel is offended by what Joe’s mother thinks of her legs, men, too, are influenced by what other men think. Except there’s no other men here. Not for the first, or last time, will representations of masculinity omit those who should be having the challenging conversation. While it is vital men embrace feminism, women training boys to be their version of men, then punishing them when they fail is not the answer. A truth disguised beneath rich veins of comedy in Harris’s predictable tale.
No Romance: A Desperate Business by Nancy Harris runs at Bewley’s Café Theatre until March 15.
For more information visit Bewley’s Café Theatre
