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Choosing illusion
Súgán draws magic from Synge’s Well
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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Súgán Theatre Company’s simple and compelling production of John Millington Synge’s The Well of the Saints provides an extremely rare opportunity to see this strange, beautiful play, which has long vanished from the repertory. Synge wrote it in 1905, a year after his staggering one-act tragedy Riders to the Sea and two years before his masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, and like both of them, it presents a complex and unflinching vision of his countrymen. Set in a mountainous, poisonously parochial district of eastern Ireland, The Well of the Saints takes the form of a fable, though its meanings seem to proliferate as it approaches the conclusion. (The same could be said of Playboy.) The main characters are Martin and Mary Doul (Billy Meleady and Beth Gotha), blind beggars who live off the charity of their neighbors. The Saint (Michael Dell’Orto), an itinerant priest, arrives in the region with a flask of water from a holy well said to have curative powers, and he applies a little to the old couple’s eyes. But the gift of sight turns out to be a forked blessing. Blind since childhood, the Douls have never set eyes on each other, and the locals, who delight in teasing them, have convinced each that the other is a beauty; when they see the truth, they’re furious with each other for what both regard as an act of sustained deception. Moreover, Martin dislikes having to work for his living and finds his new employer, Timmy the blacksmith (Derry Woodhouse), relentless and uncongenial. So when the power of the first enchanted drops fades, the Douls reject the holy man’s offer to give them a second treatment, which he claims will heal their affliction permanently. They decide they prefer the happy fantasies that blindness fosters. The play isn’t just about the necessary opium of illusion, like such modernist classics as The Iceman Cometh and The Time of Your Life. When the Douls walk away from the opportunity of seeing clearly, they also throw off the casual cruelties of their neighbors, especially Timmy and his fiancée, Molly Byrne (Therese Plaehn), who treat them as inferiors and objects of mean mischief, and who are, moreover, self-righteous and quick to decide what’s best for them. The Saint — as this production emphasizes — isn’t a kindly embodiment of Christian charity but a rock-hard taskmaster who comes close to cursing the Douls into Hell when they shrink from his bounty. And the most powerful force in the story isn’t the holy-well water but the magnificent language that spills from Martin’s lips. There’s a mysterious moment in act two when Molly, though she claims to find him physically repugnant, almost falls under the spell of his words when he conjures her to run away with him into the hills. What the Douls choose over the painful realities of sight are the exquisite promises of the word — poetry over prose. Of course, Synge was a poet playwright; all of his plays are paeans to the music created by the Irish lilt and the inverted syntax of rural Irish speech. "If it’s lies she does be telling," Martin says of Molly, whose voice has always entranced him, "she’s a sweet, beautiful voice you’d never tire to be hearing, if it was only the pig she’d be calling, or crying out in the long grass, maybe, after her hens." Staged by artistic director Carmel O’Reilly, the Súgán production is physically unimaginative (the group scenes, especially the climax, are even clumsy), but it has a wonderful sound, and that’s the key to a successful Well of the Saints. Billy Meleady does wonders with Martin’s long, extravagant speeches, especially the unsettling tirade that ends the second act, and Beth Gotha, her tiny button eyes burning in a waxy, wizened face, makes a memorable, quicksilver Mary. Derry Woodhouse is the best among the supporting cast, and Michael Dell’Orto’s Saint is such a weird, fierce presence that his qualities compensate for the shortcomings in his performance — his physical awkwardness and his tendency to overshoot the mark in his big emotional moments. You get the sense that the company caught the spirit of the piece. And what a piece it is — lyrical, magically elusive, and neglected for a century.
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