STONES IN HIS POCKETS
Gryphon Theatre, 22 Ghuznee Street, Wellington
04/10/2017 - 14/10/2017
Production Details
Ireland in his Wellingtons
Welcome to the hustle and bustle of small Irish towns
Novelty, comedy, and tragedy are abound in this two-hander!
Jake and Charlie carefully navigate the hustling “hurry up and wait” life of County Kerry, Ireland while Hollywood movie The Quiet Valley uses them and their fellow townspeople as extras.
Charlie wants his own script to be turned into a film. Jake wants the American actress Caroline. Caroline wants to possibly do an Irish accent one day.
Cast members Alexander Sparrow and Patrick McTague tackle 15 different characters, swapping out accents and physical natures multiple times in individual scenes.
Playwright Marie Jones won multiple awards with this play, including the Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Award for Best Production in 1999, and an Olivier Award in 2001 for Best New Comedy.
Director Tanya Piejus won the Antoinette Award in 2010 for Best Overall Production for The Diary of Anne Frank with Wellington Repertory Theatre.
Alexander Sparrow has made a name for himself across New Zealand and overseas as a man of many faces, winning awards for his character comedy shows including Breakout Performer at the 2016 Wellington Comedy Awards and nominations for Best Actor and Best Design at the 2017 Nelson Fringe Festival.
In Wellington, it is relatively common for wide ranges of locals and even New Zealand’s own landmass to double as elvish or orcish armies in our own homegrown or overseas cinematic productions. What happens if Hollywood’s romanticized vision of a rolling green locale collapses in on itself? Stones’ award-winning team has the answer.
Gryphon Theatre, 22 Ghuznee Street
4th to 14th October 2017
7.30pm
BOOKINGS: Tickets available at iTicket
$18 to $25
Theatre ,
Laughs, blarney and melancholy
Review by Patrick Davies 05th Oct 2017
Stones in His Pockets is one of those rare gems that sparkles from any angle. A Hollywood film has descended on a small village in Ireland and, through its many characters and locations, we see the effect of these two worlds meeting.
The Irish are generalised as great and marvellous story tellers in their own rights with a lot of the Blarney about them. Hollywood is seen as the great Machine coming in with expectations of their own worth and well known for not allowing truth to get in the way of a buck. So this play is able to cover colonialism, stereotypes (by both using and undermining them) and the effect of a dehumanised global economic system on actual people.
Playwright Marie Jones takes this fiction within a fiction to the limit by requiring two actors to portray the multitudes. And here Alexander Sparrow and Patrick McTague deliver the goods. The accents are pitch perfect and easily identifiable amongst the vast array of Irish characters just as much as the American. Director Tanya Piejus has worked hard to ensure each character’s physical and emotional timbre is clarified so that at each lightening-speed change we know who we are watching.
The set is just as stripped back to an almost spare stage to allow freedom of movement through the many locations, with exactly the right kind of support from Aaron Blackledge’s lights which provide stylistic hints in line with the suggestive production. Costumes (Piejus) are only what is required (a scarf for one, a cane for another) freeing up the actors movements.
Piejus’ use of the stage space to delineate character, time and locale, looks deceptively easy and yet can only come with a clear vision backed up by hard work. My only niggle is a lack of any music when we enter the auditorium, I’m not sure the lack of atmosphere gets us off to the right start.
This production would sit easily within any of our funded theatres. There are great laughs and, like any good Irish story, a touch of the melancholy – the title is a real kicker. I really do hope that this production gets the numbers it deserves. Highly recommended.
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