A Night With George’, a one woman comedy permeated with West Belfast humour and idiom. The play was brought to the Downpatrick stage by the local RGU who run occasional drama events. With
Donna O’Connor who played the role of Bridie Murphy from Ballymurphy who looks back over her life’s ups and downs and ponders in her future all while spending a night with cut-out figure hunk George Clooney. The cut-out was procured after a night out with the girls. Bridie arrived home well sizzled and proceeds to chat to her hero..
With her life journey and marriage through the Troubles and the Peace Process and beyond, this play is a potted, selected modern history of Northern Ireland through the experience of Bridie.
Brassneck Theatre actually plays a crucial roll in helping form new views of an often stereotyped West Belfast society. The company has taken this much acclaimed play to America, Ireland, England and is touring the North with it to packed houses.
Director Tony Devlin said, “This play is in huge demand. It is selling itself. I was talking to someone the other day who had seen it 10 times. Just amazing. Donna O’Connor plays the part of Bridie so well bringing out all the nuances in her personality. The play touches so many people and never fails to make audiences laugh.”
Bridie’s problems really centred around her husband Seamus spending 17 years in Long Kesh. Before long, Bridie is pouring George a ‘Belfast martini’ (vodka and coke) and proceeds with her monologue.
Her attraction to Clooney is more than obvious in occasional one liners such as “I’d eat my dinner off your bare a**e…” which set the jam packed audience alight.
But as she brought up her only son Emmet alone there were plenty of funny moments when their dog named ‘Barricade’ would lie on the road when the army were approaching.
The play too is a social criticism about IRA men who put on suits and ‘swanned about Stormont’. The panoramic political process is given a sharp treatment but in the second stage of the play Bridie moves off onto her holiday experience in Italy which proved to be a fascinating cultural experience… mainly for the Italians!
But the plot twisted as Bridie explores post-modern themes and before long she has the audience in stitches about her son Emmet living in England. He has turned out to be gay and in true fashion she runs through the various stereotypical reactions from family members to this news. It is certainly a play for adults as the humour was rough and ready and very West Belfast in its delivery. She refers to the Dirty Protesters and Hunger Srikers as looking like “lots of John the Baptists”.
But Bridie proudly walked her son up the aisle in his gay wedding to the chagrin of the Free Presbyterians placarding and protesting outside the City Hall.
As the play closes, you wonder where it all is heading. Bridie clinches the cut out George Clooney and just for that moment her life will be just all right. After all, it’s not every night that a woman gets a chance to spend a night with George.
Bridie’s life journey is indeed full of drama, probably in a different way from George Clooney. There is no glitz and glamour in her existence. Just the mundane experiences of a Ballymurphy mother in its years of turmoil.
There are low moments in the performance when Bridie’s personal pain is to the fore, then in an instant a few words and the audience is again laughing. The audience could closely identify with Bridie, as probably almost everyone knows someone like her in their lives. But on stage she was larger than life, and Donna O’Connor played the part magnificently with great energy and faultless delivery.]]>
