Looking Back: Wideboy Gospel
WIDEBOY GOSPEL - WINNER OF THE STEWART PARKER AWARD 2000
“Quids in. Win this few bob, I do. Nice few bob. The National Lottery. A tidy sum. August. On the telly an’ all. Spinning the wheel. A celebrity. Decked out in designer clobber. Hit the sauce big-time, decorating the mahogany for all and sundry. Pisshead nation.”
“My Lottery Win Hell.” It’s sleaze, pills, thrills and bellyaches for Snorkey King, until an old joyriding mystery is solved and his ex-bird’s dreaded brothers, The Duracels, come looking for blood. In the end it’s his part in the running battles with English football fans that just might save his life…this is a play that doesn’t go looking for trouble but ends up getting glassed.
Bedrock presented this sharply observed, very funny one-man play set in Dublin at the time of the Ireland - English match in ‘95 at Lansdowne Road. A snapshot of modern Irish life, Wideboy Gospel reinforced Bedrock’s reputation as a leading voice in Irish theatre.
Wideboy Gospel, was written by Dublin writer Ken Harmon (winner of the Steward Parker Award 2000). The play premiered at the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival before it’s Irish premier at the Galway Arts Festival and then launching the programme at the new Project Arts Centre building.
From the Wideboy Gospel press pack.
REVIEW The Guardian, Thursday 10th August 2000
**4 STARS**
Ken Harmon’s new one-man play kicks up football memories of 1995, when an England-Ireland friendly was abandoned because,after the Irish scored, English yobs tore up the terraces and flung them at the Irish police. The monologue charts the reaction from a world of rough West Dublin estates. It’s a colourful, macho satire in which everyone is endemically criminalised.
Ronan Leahy plays Snorkie, a low level mad bastard who is generally on the receiving end in life: from his grave-robbing stone-mason boss to his girl-friend Nicola, or indeed her brother Sammy “Duracell”, a much admired local psycho. The play kicks off with a drunken truth game in which Snorkie tells Nicola that he robbed a car - the crime for which the local paramilitaries hospitalised Duracell. So Snorkie’s owed a hiding, and the England game only serves as a tension-diffuser.
The hilarity gets black as Snorkie describes the coming together of the local tribes in the pub. The staccato script is pure Dublin baroque, a great thump of contemporary slang. The ’smell my middle finger” lad’s humour, however, prevents any possible pathos, or much real penetration into the mas sectarianism of Harmon’s subject matter.
Leahy’s performance is like a controlled explosion. Under Jimmy Fay’s direction, he choreographs it like on long martial arts manoeuvre: karate turns and air-punches, the percussive nose-hiss with every head-slap, malignantly searching every face in the auditorium after his more evil utterances. MIC MORONEY
REVIEW The Sunday Tribune, 6th August 2000
Winner of the 2000 Stewart Parker Award, Ken Harmon’s Wideboy Gospel is a play about the virtues of lying - or rather about the unforeseen and violent consequences of telling the truth. Snorkey, self professed wideboy and lotto winner; tells his girlfriend Nikla, in the middle of a lovers spat, that he robbed the car “with the £3,000 worth of tools that got thrown all over the road, that belonged to the mechanic who was related to the paramilitaries,” who beat her crazy criminal sibling Sammy Duracel, “into a six day coma because they thought it was him…”
While Snorkey is not the smartest small time criminal, he is savvy enough to know that you “never tell your bird nothing,” especially when it involves her brother who “is the bloke that the people who sort things out go to when things get too heavy for them…Keep schtum. Sooner or later; it’ll come back to haunt you.” Will Nikla tell Sammy? Will Sammy hurt Snorkey? Will Snorkey live long enough to finish his story? Harmon’s monologue is an ingeniously constructed narrative in which the drama of Snorkey’s survival is continually asserted and elaborated even as its unreliable narrator tries to avoid it, digressing from one seemingly unconnected vent to another.
Every event and every character Snorkey encounters in the course of his story affects his survival. Harmon’s sudden narrative reversals (Snorkey makes and breaks up with with Nikla at least twice) and idiosyncratic characterisation reinforces Snorkey’s perilous situation - he doesn’t know what’s going on, and everything and nothing could be important - and injects his story with a dramatic urgency and force.
In a play in which alternative versions of events compete, Wideboy Gospel offers its audience a dramatic narrative whose narrator consciously manipulates his story and their meaning for his own ends: his ‘gospel’ is the best version. Harmon’s language bops between vernacular and slang, and, shifting easily between tenses and voices, bounces along on staccato phrases to create a narrative style and rhythm which both mirrors and amplifies Snorkey’s growing panic as events spiral out of control.
Johanna Connor’s minimal set design of three suspended grey frames enclosing brick, plaster and cement and Lee Davis’s emblematic lighting (green, white and gold for the football riots, blood red for Snorkey’s encounter with Sammy) locate Snorkey’s story in a figurative urban environment - Our Area rather than Our Town - while Catherine Fay’s designer label emphasises his street smart likely laddism. Jimmy Fay’s confident and precise direction and Ronan Leahy’s effortlessly controlled and detailed performance infuses Harmon’s play with a beguiling theatricality. Fay’s dynamic scenography and Leahy’s easily physicality discover in Snorkey’s braggadocio its underlying emotional and psychological impulses - both Snorkey’s personality and life are an elaborate performance which threatens to fall apart at any given moment. Harmon’s play unfolds in the social margins of large housing estates and inner city pubs, and in the economic black market of low paid jobs and mid level criminality. In the course of the riots, Snorkey and Sammy are reunited with some English mates they met on holiday in Crete, their shared experiences transcending nationalist differences. In Bedrock Theatre’s superb production, Wideboy Gospel is a piece of theatre whose swagger and humour belie its gentle compassion and sharp intelligence. JOCELYN CLARKE
REVIEW City Tribune, Friday 28th July, 2000
One-man show is pacy and entertaining
The adventures and daily lifestyles of Dublin’s low life is the theme of Wideboy Gospel, an award winning one man play which opened yesterday evening at the Aras na Mac Leinn Theatre, NUIG. The Ken Harman monologue was brilliantly performed by Ronan Leahy who through the “holiday from hell” with his girlfriend in Crete, his new job in a graveyard, his colourful home life and why he didn’t get to the England/Ireland match in Lansdowne Road.
His is a lifestyle that is on another level entirely. Instead of window shopping (where you look but on’t shop) he goes window robbing where he looks but doesn’t rob. Instead he rings up a regular contact who shoplifts his chosen designer jacket for him.
Snorkey (that’s the character’s name) lives life on the edge but this is his local community. He drinks in the roughest shops (pubs) in town, mixes with people who have names like Sammy Duracell and Malteaser and calls his own grand-dad ‘More Tea’ because of his consumption of the beverage.
There are some great lines, like the one about his grand-dad and father being on the wagon and betting £100 to see who stays off the drink longest - the loser gets to drink the winnings!
The story comes to a climax when he gives his match ticket away to Junior Durcell because he has a hot date (more like a shag really) but gets waylaid and has a watch it on the telly with his family.
The he describes the scenes of violence at Lansdowne Road and gets a call that he has to join the gang to beat up English fans. It’s all high jinks and quite graphically described by Snorkey in his best Dublin accent including the usual profanities.
There are no subtleties in the play. Everything is laid bare, even intimate toilet details are given. The script is so well written and so fast that there is a great sense of excitment on stage. The lighting is well used on a simple backdrop to indicate a change of scene.
It is not surprising that this play won the Stewart Parker Award but what is a script without a good actor? Leahy plays his part with such vigour and animation that his shirt is wet with sweat at the end of the 70 minutes. BERNIE Ni FHLATHARTA
