Theater Review: Toibin’s satire skewers Ireland’s high and mighty

By Joseph Hurley

AN EVENING WITH NIALL TOIBIN. Second International Irish Comedy Festival. At the Irish Arts Center, West 51st St., NYC. Through March 24.

At age 71, the handsome, silver-haired Niall Toibin, wearing a gleaming white jacket over a dark green shirt and charcoal trousers, could easily pass for one of the elegantly appointed Irish politicians he lampoons so adroitly in the appealingly funny, humanely satiric solo show he’s been touring around Ireland in whatever time he has free from his ongoing role as "Father Mac" in the beloved 6-year-old TV series "Ballykissangel."

The venture, which, exercising characteristic directness and lack of fuss, he calls "An Evening with Niall Toibin," has arrived at the Irish Arts Center as the opening segment of the Second International Irish Comedy Festival.

The amiable Toibin, who resembles to the late Spencer Tracy, is so comfortable with his material and his audience that he lobs his show across with such effortlessness and grace that it’s as if he were telling these stories across his dinner table.

His subjects, for the most part, tend to encompass Irish sporting life, politics, sexual attitudes and a full gallery of eccentrics, the latter comprising little thumbnail sketches.

Given that the actor’s Art Center audiences are made up largely of Irish and Irish Americans, Toibin has opted not to retailor his material. Toibin’s acting skills are so finely honed that he can create character with a glance, a slight change of expression, or even a single syllable or two, motivating his audiences to follow his every word and gesture, and to go precisely where he wants to lead them.

Toibin has a tidy gift for neat turns of phrase, referring to one GAA stalwart, accused of "robustness of play," as behaving "like a kangaroo on Ecstasy."

The performer’s gift for political satire is acute and sometimes devastating, particularly when he’s skewering the questionable personal histories of such individuals as Garret FitzGerald, Charlie Haughey and Bertie Ahern, including glancing comments regarding the latter’s relationship with Celia Larkin.

To Toibin, Ireland has become "one enormous film set," which leads him to comments about movies in general, and, in particular, the way the Irish watch them and think about them.

In "Basic Instinct," for example, when the character played by Sharon Stone produces a knife during a sexual encounter with the character played by Michael Douglas, the actor swears he heard someone in the audience inquire, "Where’d she keep the knife?"

On another occasion, a pair of lovers undress, throwing items of clothing at random around their apartment. Toibin claims he heard a woman complain: "That’s right; just throw them anywhere for somebody else to pick up for you."

Toibin’s humor is, for the most part, inherently gentle, architectured more toward eliciting chuckles than outright guffaws.

To audiences who’ve known him for the better part of a decade as Father Mac of "Ballykissangel," it may come as something of a surprise that a good measure of the actor’s material in "An Evening with Niall Toibin" has a decided scatological tinge, much of which he delivers with a sly and knowing look in his eye, as if to dare his listeners to disapprove.

Running just a touch longer than 90 minutes, "An Evening with Niall Toibin" ends with what must be a kind of "party piece" for the performer. Pretending to have been asked by a Cork audience not to conclude an appearance with "On the Banks of My Own Lovely Lee," a ballad every inhabitant of the county knows by heart, the actor manages to sing the hymn "Jerusalem," sometimes known as "The Holy City," to the tune of "The Holy Ground," a song long associated with the Clancy Brothers.

Somehow croaking, gimlet-eyed, the character Toibin is playing obstinately reverts to "On the Banks of My Own Lovely Lee," without missing a beat or taking a breath, while the audience dissolves in laughter. Toibin knows enough to leave his audience wanting more, which is precisely what he’s doing with his delightfully conceived show.