By Joseph Hurley
STONES IN HIS POCKETS, by Marie Jones. Directed by Ian McElhinney. Starring Conleth Hill and Sean Campion. At Golden Theatre, 252 West 45th St., NYC.
There are just two actors in Marie Jones’s joyous romp, "Stones in His Pockets," but when you see it, as you must, you will very probably find yourself thinking you’re seeing three or four or even five of the play’s 15 characters on stage at once.
Seeing this work, wondrously directed by Ian McElhinney, who happens to be the playwright’s husband and, like Jones, a familiar figure in Belfast theaters, requires of its audiences an ongoing readjustment, merely to keep in mind that the stage is populated by two utterly remarkable and captivating actors, Conleth Hill and Sean Campion, and by nobody else.
Make no mistake, what the splendid Hill and the dazzling Campion, who’ve played the show in Belfast, Dublin, Edinburgh and London, always to vast acclaim, have achieved is the kind of awe-inspiring, bravura acting of which the late Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne made a particular specialty.
During the London run of "Stones in His Pockets," which is still running at the Duke of York’s Theater in the British capital with a replacement cast, the two stars were nominated for the coveted Laurence Olivier Awards, the English theater’s equivalent of our Tony Awards. Hill won the prize, which was given him by Campion on television in Toronto, where Jones’s comedy was playing its pre-Broadway performances.
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Seeing the play, it seems utterly inconceivable how anyone could possibly have ranked one actor’s work above the other, so indivisibly conceived, calibrated and executed is the work being done by these staggeringly gifted performers, all the more welcome for their being almost completely unknown to local audiences, since neither has ever worked in the United States until now, despite having racked up extensive and impressive professional resumes. For all their skill and the stunning inventiveness, with which director McElhinney has showcased their dexterity and their obvious intelligence, there is about both Hill and Campion an openness and a generosity that motivates audiences to feel something akin to love for them as Jones’s remarkable play proceeds. There are very few performers in the world who possess that particular degree of accessibility and can project it across the footlights.
As much as "Stones in His Pockets" is to a large degree an actor’s event, in fact a towering celebration of the thespic art itself, it is also much more than that.
What playwright Jones, best-known heretofore for her off-Broadway success, "A Night in November," in which a Belfast Protestant, a repressed civil servant, learns the nature of prejudice in the course of attending a single football match, has achieved in her new play is a tender comedy of genuine originality, true and deep feeling, with a poignant, even tragic undercoating that somehow heightens the resounding joyousness of the overall event. The work’s appealing title suggests, perhaps, the writer’s sympathy for the serious subtext.
An American production company has arrived in a County Kerry town to make a movie that sounds suspiciously like Ron Howard’s star-filled flop of a few seasons back, "Far and Away," but which the bulk of the "Stones" people tend to deny is about any one film.
Whatever the reality, "The Quiet Valley," the movie on which the "Stones" heroes, Charlie Conlon (Hill) and Jake Quinn (Campion) are working as extras, along with, it seems, most of the rest of their neighbors, has to do with M’ve, the daughter of area’s richest family, and her love for Rory, a humble farmer’s son.
Jones, a familiar Belfast actress who, in 1993, played the mother of Daniel Day Lewis in "In the Name of the Father," has populated "Stones in His Pockets" with a galaxy of locals and visitors ranging from Aisling, the film crew’s officious, hysteria-bent Irish production assistant, to Caroline Giovanni, the indulged, spoiled, but far from stupid star cast in the movie’s female leading role, a canny professional who, according to a colleague, "goes ethnic" when she’s looking for a location bedmate, since, after all, the right partner can do double duty as her dialect coach if needed.
The rangy Campion, bounding around the Golden stage like a jumped-up kangaroo on a pogo stick, turns Aisling into something close to Shelley Duvall on uppers, while the mildly chubby Hill gives us a humane Caroline whose eye is nevertheless, in all weathers, firmly fixed on her own best interests.
And then there are the men. Although Kurt Steiner, the American actor who plays "Rory" in "The Quiet Valley" never makes an "appearance" in "Stones in His Pockets," Simon, the womanizing, bullying first assistant director, who can’t keep his hands off Aisling, is "present," and so is Jock Campbell, Caroline’s muscle-bound Scottish security guard.
Still on the production crew side, there’s Dave, the rigger, who offers Charlie some "coke," which the gullible villager thinks ought to come in a glass, not to mention the evil-tempered Clem Curtis, the movie’s jaded director, and John, the official dialect coach, in whom Caroline invests little if any faith.
Representing the village are some of the most memorable "Stones" characters, including the arthritic, elderly Michael, possibly "the last living extra from ‘The Quiet Man,’ " filmed by John Ford a half-century ago, a man John Wayne reportedly referred to as "Wee Mickey."
The play derives its title from a pivotal incident involving Sean Harkin, a doomed 17-year-old cousin of Jake’s, whose sad fate brings Brother Gerald, the village religious, onto the scene, briefly, but nevertheless long enough to underscore the serious and moving elements that give the essentially hilarious "Stones in His Pockets" a solid grounding in reality. Young Harkin’s fate, brought on in part by the presence of the movie people, is a reminder as well that some of the harsher realities of present day life have reached even rural Ireland.
Then there’s a toffee-mouthed RTE broadcaster named Doherty, a couple of Harkin’s grieving relatives, and probably one or two others who drift namelessly across playwright Jones’s astonishingly detailed and richly imagined storyscape.
Whether her characters are on the scene for only a moment, or, as is the case with several of them, make return appearances and thereby become part of the play’s main fabric, they are given visible stage life through the inspired performing of Campion and Hill, a pair of splendid actors whose exquisite timing and gift for imaginative detail conjures up the old saw about a brace of inspired players somehow delivering a single, seamless, brilliantly unified performance.
Cliche though it may be, that’s the reality of the work being done by these extraordinary artists — Hill from Northern Ireland and Campion from the Republic. Next month, when Tony Award nominations are announced, it seems certain their names will appear, giving Tony voters the same problem that faced the Olivier people in London, namely how to differentiate between two utterly brilliant, totally indivisible performances.
"Stones in His Pockets" is played on a nearly bare stage, with only a long row of unused shoes and boots lined up beneath designer Jack Kirwan’s film-strip backdrop of billowing clouds, deftly lighted by James McFetridge. The makings of "Stones in His Pockets" are simplicity itself, but they conjure up a world, genuine in detail, authentic in feeling, and, wondrously rendered, wholly unforgettable. "Stones in His Pockets" is one of the Broadway season’s richest, finest experiences.