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Sive
John B. Keane

    Listowel, County Kerry, February 2 1959: The Listowel Drama Group presents the first production of local publican and playwright John B. Keane’s Sive. It is a hard-hitting naturalistic drama, set in a country cottage shared by three generations of the Glavin family. The youngest, Sive, is a beautiful schoolgirl, a prime example of the bright potential of the new Ireland. Though she is the illegitimate daughter of two dead parents, she is educated, intelligent, warm, and forward-looking. Her uncle Mike is a no-nonsense farmer who works all day digging turf and brings home the cash to his hard-bitten wife Mena. Mena is frustrated. She feels slighted by the presence of Sive, whom she sees as a useless freeloader and an affront to her experience of a woman’s role in rural Irish life. Mena is also antagonized by Nanna, Sive’s pipe-smoking grandmother who bemoans the lack of children for her to care for in her frail dotage and blames Mena for not producing.
    The plot kicks in with the arrival of seedy matchmaker Thomasheen Seán Rua, who comes with a proposal from elderly farmer Seán Dóta. Dóta has become entranced by the youthful energy and beauty of Sive, and offers two hundred pounds to Mena plus and a hundred to Thomasheen if a match can be arranged. Sive, who is in love with local boy Liam Scuab, is not pleased with the idea, but through a combination of bullying and psychological manipulation by Mena, she eventually acquiesces, all but breaking her spirit. The final act offers a glimmer of hope as an elopement is proposed through intermediaries including two wandering tinkers, but in this dark, oppressive, world where modern greed and ancient tradition conspire to destroy all hope of a progressive future, the outcome is never in doubt.
    The Ireland into which Sive was initially produced was itself a site of contestation between social and economic policies which were set to transform it from a pre-modern to a modern society and older, more atavistic forces bound by custom and obedience. The play was actually rejected by the Abbey for production on the professional stage, and thus began its life on the amateur circuit, where it toured to massive success and near-rioting in some places as audiences scrabbled to get tickets.
    Keane’s scandalous, sexually-charged world where a beautiful young girl was essentially being "sold like an animal" to a grasping old man was at once familiar, and yet dramatically exaggerated. Keane, an avowed observer of real human lives, had a seemingly natural ability to combine realism and drama on a level equivalent with any of the masters of modern European theatre. Yet his was now an older style, in some ways a relic. Four years after Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot had premiered in Dublin, signaling to the world that Irish theatre had entered a new age, Sive went on to win the All-Ireland drama trophy and continued to be a primarily amateur text for many years.
    The revival of Keane’s work began long before Druid’s current production of Sive. After decades of neglect, the National Theatre began to reassess the playwright’s output in the 1980s. Recognizing that his was a powerful theatrical mind, as rich and rewarding as Shakespeare or Chekov, professional revivals of plays including The Year of the Hiker, Big Maggie, and The Field proved a success, making Keane a standard of the repertoire of the commercial stage in Ireland. In recent years, his comedies The Matchmaker and The Chastitute have packed commercial houses. Meanwhile Druid director and Tony-award winning Garry Hynes also helmed the recent Abbey revival of Big Maggie, stripping the story of virtually all of its vitality in the service of exposing its pedantic roots.
    This production of Sive initially gives the impression of going in the same direction as Big Maggie, with its washed-out set design by Francis O’Connor and its pale lighting by David Cunningham, but it quickly becomes clear that this show retains all of the vigor and brutality of the very best of Keane. This is a production of terrifying intensity which leaves the audience breathless with anxiety. Fluid, precise delivery by all of the cast; balletic, only slightly but significantly formalized movement directed by David Bolger, and a steady sense of pace and rhythm from Hynes which impels the audience towards the tragic climax as if part of a funerary procession combine with shattering effect. After the leering postmodernism of the Martin McDonagh plays, it is inspiring to see the Druid’s first production of this playwright’s work getting to the heart of darkness without recourse to demagoguery.
    Eamonn Morrisey is alive with evil energy as Thomasheen. The actor makes this a role of virtually Mephistophelian villainy, yet one rooted in the dialect and manner of a recognizable rural type. Derbhle Crotty is an equally superb Mena, sallow-eyed and virtually boiling over with hatred and greed, and yet entirely believable (and even faintly sympathetic) within the bounds of naturalistic characterization. The ever-dependable Anna Manahan tackles the dramatic role of Nanna with as much professional craft as she usually manages the comic (The Matchmaker).  Her handling of some of the key lines ("this house is a hatchery for sin") helps to maintain the delicate balance between monumental drama and believable humanity. Gary Lydon (A Whistle in the Dark) is also brilliantly balanced as the indecisive Uncle Mike. Unable to choose sides in spite of his heart’s warning that what they are doing to his niece is wrong, Mike’s refusal to act eventually makes him as culpable as any in this murderous tragedy. The actor captures a sense of the character’s shifting moods and emotional torment which leaves a strong impression. Frank O’Sullivan and Peter Halpin also dominate the stage with their self-consciously Greek Chorus-like performance as two ‘travelling men’ who bring news and sing curses, reminding all and sundry of an older, pre-modern social and theatrical culture.

    Dublin, October 10, 2002                                                                        - Harvey O'Brien