TimeOut London
Posted on March 19th, 2008 by Mike

Venue: White Bear Theatre,
138 Kennington Park Rd, SE11 4RB
Times: Tue-Sat 7.30pm, Sun Mat 5pm
Price: £12, concs £10
Tube: Kennington

Sive
Until Mar 30 White Bear Theatre, 138 Kennington Park Rd, SE11 4RB
Rating: 3 Stars

This 1959 rural tragedy is a nice fit all round for a pub theatre: playwright and Kerry bar owner John B Keane is said to have written it in his own Listowel pub after closing hours, while Tom Begley’s production convincingly and atmospherically transforms the White Bear’s black-box playing space into a midcentury cottage kitchen.

‘The writer’s greatest asset is his indignation,’ Keane once suggested. ‘Sive’ is accordingly a passionate play, fired by indignation or something stronger. The action takes place in a country community in Ireland as it becomes caught in the feverish grip of money madness. When local matchmaker Tomasheen Sean Rúa proposes that orphaned schoolgirl Sive could do worse than marry aged farmer Sean Dotá – ‘He have the grass of 20 cows!’ he rasps – Sive’s aunt, Mena, is initially unconvinced. But when Tomasheen offers her a financial inducement (‘Think of the 200 sovereigns dancing in the heel of your hand’), she suddenly warms to her task, so sealing the girl’s fate.

This small tragedy of primordial passions is tightly plotted and beautifully scripted in Keane’s heightened, poetic language. Continual irruptions by a pair of bizarre tinker-poets and John Morrissey’s Tomasheen give the domestic proceedings an extra social dimension and provide a seasoning of (menacing) comic relief. Susan Cummins is outstanding as Sive’s scheming aunt; she is well matched with John Casey, who plays Uncle Mike as a desultory mixture of good intentions and moral impotence. Sive herself, nicely incarnated by Lucy de Brún, remains almost silent throughout, a mutely potent symbol of the sacrifice of innocence.

Robert Shore, Mon Mar 17, TimeOut London

Robert Shore
TimeOut London

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