By Joseph Hurley
SOME VOICES, by Joe Penhall. Directed by Kevin Kittle. Featuring Victor Villar-Hauser, Mike Finesilver, Patrick Tull, Laoisa Sexton and David Costelloe. At the Greenwich Street Theatre, 547 Greenwich Street, NYC. Through Sunday, Oct. 7.
During the tenure of the Conservative regime headed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, according to a note written by playwright Joe Penhall for the program for the current New York revival of his debut play, “Some Voices,” “government legislation had closed down most of the UK’s Victorian mental institutions in an attempt to drive the nation’s mental patients back to the bosom of the reluctant community.”
Much the same thing, of course, took place in American cities, New York very much included, resulting in a visible increase in the presence in the streets of the number of homeless, frequently dazed-seeming individuals.
The expulsion of so many of Britain’s mentally ill from the institutions that had housed them motivated tyro dramatist Penhall, the author of London’s biggest current hit, “Blue/Orange,” to write “Some Voices,” which became a significant part of London’s Royal Court Theatre’s 1994 season, and went on to win the John Whiting Award in 1995.
On another level, “Some Voices” deals with the plight of young Irish men and women who migrate across the Irish Sea in search of better lives, but all too often encounter worse times than those they knew at home, drifting into dissolution and casual crime.
Never miss an issue of The Irish Echo
Subscribe to one of our great value packages.
Penhall’s naive, harmless hero, Ray, is first glimpsed as an inmate about to be released from a British mental hospital, and, 18 brief scenes later, is last seen, following another breakdown, as a resident of a hostel.
The somewhat childlike Ray has been released to the care of his distracted and emotionally distanced older brother, Pete, who has his hands full trying to operate the declining family restaurant he has inherited following the deaths of his parents.
In his innocent, aimless wanderings around the play’s West London neighborhood, Ray encounters Laura, a young girl from Limerick, in the course of being abused by Dave, her thug-like boyfriend, also an Irish migrant.
Attempting to interfere in the dispute between the habitually battered Laura and the brutal Dave, who has impregnated her, Ray, who is written as something of a Holy Fool, becomes involved in the lives of the girl, and, to an extent, her batterer as well.
Following a pattern all too familiar with mental patients, the schizophrenic Ray goes to great lengths to avoid taking the drugs that have been prescribed in an attempt to give him a manageable life, free from the psychotic breaks he has suffered in the past.
Although he never specifically says it in so many words, Ray clearly feels that the pills he carries, but does not consume, keep him from being “himself,” even a damaged version of the man he believes himself to be.
The “voices” of the title refers most obviously to those voices that speak to Ray as his mental disorientation builds to breakdown point. In another context, however, the “voices” are those heard in a British society straining to cope with the problems of the mentally disabled.
The subject of mental instability is one to which Penhall returned in “Blue/Orange,” whose three characters are a young patient, this time a black African, and two doctors at odds over the course his treatment should take.
Writing in the Guardian earlier this year, Dublin-born playwright Conor McPherson generously described Joe Penhall as “one of the greatest writers working today,” and this somewhat inflated-sounding assessment may ultimately be proven accurate.
Surely the indications of Penhall’s excellence are present in “Some Voices,” first seen in New York in a 1999 New Group production in which Ray was eloquently played by Jamie Harris, the youngest of the three sons of actor Richard Harris.
Penhall’s writing is succinct, economical, and, frequently, as eloquent as it is surprising.
In the Villar-Hauser Theatre Development Fund’s bare bones production, efficiently and imaginatively directed by Kevin Kittle, the five-member company is made up of what the press materials rather oddly refer to as “an all-British and Irish cast of New York-based actors.”
Victor Villar-Hauser, is utterly convincing and extremely moving as the compromised, inherently defenseless Ray, while Mike Finesilver’s Pete is a veritable fireplug of alternating compassion and stubborn self-interest. Patrick Tull provides yeoman service as Ives, a hospital colleague of Ray’s.
The play’s two Irish characters are well-cast, with the vulnerable and sympathetic Laura played by Dubliner Laoisa Sexton, and the brutal, mindless bully, Dave, done deftly by Galway-born David Costelloe, who has been seen to good effect in two other Irish-oriented off-Broadway productions in recent months, first Joseph O’Connor’s “Red Roses and Petrol” at the Irish Arts Center, and then the widely praised Irish Repertory Theatre staging of Hugh Leonard’s “A Life.”
“Some Voices,” on view at the Greenwich Street Theatre west of Soho, provides an unusual opportunity to experience the excellent early work of a writer destined to be a potent force in English-language theater.