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Theatre: The performer is compelling as Judy Garland, whose final years are the focus of Peter Quilter’s play
– Anna-Jane Casey’s voice soars as it conveys a heart almost ritually broken Theatre: The performer is compelling as Judy Garland, whose final years are the focus of Peter Quilter’s playhad millions of fans.
To judge by the applause at the end of this presentation, many of them are in the audience on the opening here of Peter Quilter’s play, nearly 60 years after her death. The script concentrates on the final year of Garland’s life.
This was emphatically not her heyday, yet the tight structure of the dialogue is studded with crisp one-liners, lightening even torrential rows with flashes of her verbal and mental vivacity and strengthening the drama of a life burning out and a legend beginning to spark. Garland spent her last months in London, where she was engaged for a run of concerts at the Talk of the Town Club in 1969.
With her are her fiance, and new manager, Mickey Deans , and her accompanist, Anthony . The men compete to regain not merely her eminence as a performer but also her integrity as a person; only Mickey admits to knowing how deep in the ditch she is. A long road to Ireland: ‘The Irish are very secretive.
They don’t tell you stuff’Actor Olwen Fouéré: ‘I firmly believe we are in the last days of the Anthropocene’ In her addicted desperation for the cocktails of alcohol, amphetamines and barbiturates that have both sustained and damaged her for 30 years, Garland quickly sheds her veneer of fragile ebullience in a series of arguments mounting word by word from mild commentary to outrageous and foul-mouthed abuse. The men succumb to the desperation of her need, even when they realise that she has been so reckless as to take medication meant for a cocker spaniel.
Garland takes this on as a great joke, but she knows it is another measurement of the depth of the ditch. So there’s a lot of shouting in this play. Cigarette in hand, Anna-Jane Casey balances the load with her quips and, most convincingly, with her singing. She seizes the voice.
It soars where it must, but it is reaching from the trench of a commercially brutalised childhood and a heart that is almost ritually broken. She makes the lyric “I can’t give you anything but love” more like a threat than a promise, coming from someone who knows that love isn’t enough. When You’re Smiling comes as if from the gritted teeth of a disbeliever.
Glittering like the barricade of lights that surround her on the stage of the Talk of the Town, she abuses her audiences while seducing them with The Man That Got Away. After five marriages, all Judy’s men got away; here Casey’s tone lowers to something haunting, a sense that time is not so much running out as being extinguished. Ciarán Bagnall’s set is, like Garland herself, beautifully dressed. The disappointment of the play – which is produced by Breda Cashe and Pat Moylan, and directed by Conor Hanratty, with terrific music from the Niall Kinsella Orchestra – is in the weaker writing for Mickey and Anthony. The achievement of the play is where, captured like a shrine by Viko Nikci’s spotlight, Casey crowns her compelling performance as she sings Over the Rainbow like a lingering elegy.
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