A musical divided

Colin Murphy ventures upriver to check out the Ha'penny Bridge

The Ha'Penny Bridge
The Point Theatre, Dublin
Until 9 July. Tickets €35.75, €44, €49.50 and €55.

This is a brash, sentimental, overlong and awkwardly-structured musical. It is also ambitious, musically varied, very well performed and strikingly staged. The Ha'penny Bridge marks a brave – foolhardy, perhaps – entrée into Irish theatre by writer Alastair McGuckian, a leading farming systems designer and businessman who has funded the production himself. At the very least, its ambition is exciting and, despite its evident weaknesses, it is produced with consumate style and rigour.

As the title (and the blurb: "A love torn apart in a country divided") might indicate, The Ha'penny Bridge is, in part, a saccharine, glib, sentimental story of romance in dirty Dublin. This is a Dublin where the craic is mighty and the porter flowing. Its population are so enthused they regularly break into song: "I love you Dub/ You're looking great this morning/ I love you Dub/ A great spot to be born in". And: "The craic in Dublin's hard to beat/ Come on, we'll find another street". As well as enthusiastic, the locals are hilariously witty. The men are agreeable drunks or cloth-capped likely young lads, the women are happy whores or sarky street traders. And the local priest looms and leers over it all, frowning.

As drama, this musical is awful, though probably marketable. Each scene looks like a set piece from some kind of theme park, cabaret numbers perhaps for a Las Vegas "Irish Experience". They are, though, well-choreographed and full of energy, and they have a quirky, perhaps ironic, charm for that.

But there is another musical in The Ha'penny Bridge, one that appears to be closer to McGuckian's heart and that is, as a result, rawer and more convincing. This is a story of a city mired in civil war and poverty, where there is tragedy in the doomed struggle of his characters to transcend their oppressive environment. That should be familiar – for McGuckian owes a substantial debt to Sean O'Casey.

This schitzophrenia cuts throughout The Ha'penny Bridge, and their juxtaposition creates enormous bathos. Scenes of historical verisimilitude are quickly followed with scenes of Irish muppetry, and tragic and dramatic events are bathed in sentiment or glossed over in musical frolicking.

The Ha'penny Bridge is the story of Molly, an independent-minded young Dublin woman, angry at the destruction and poverty afflicting her city. Her father is an auld drunk who happens to own a successful greyhound, which promises a change in the family's fortunes as a young English lad comes looking to buy it. But the local Irregulars – the IRA – don't like the look of this Englishman sloping around their part of the city...

Love, in musicals, happens pretty quickly. Even so, the alacrity with which our socialist suffragette heroine falls for the greyhound-dealing Cockney wideboy, George, is alarming. One minute, Molly's all fire and brimstone about unemployment and inequality, the next she's dancing to George's description of the glitz and glamour of Picadilly; and then she's singing: "My arms are aching to hold him, to hold him forever more".

Despite the best efforts of Annalene Beechey and Stephen Ashfield, whose performances radiate enthusiasm and character, their romance remains merely a dramatic conceit. McGuckian needs to finish the play with Molly's death, which must be by accident. So he gives her a lover who will be a credible target of the local Irregulars, but never quite becomes a credible love-interest for his heroine.

It's easy to be a theatrical snob with regard to the Point. Less a theatre than an aircraft hangar, it has the acoustic and visual clarity of a misty day in the Wicklow mountains. Everything in the venue conspires to distance the audience from the drama onstage. Amidst all this, it's easy to forget that The Ha'pennny Bridge demonstrates a very real success – even if only half full, it's still pulling more people in to see it than most new Irish plays or musicals, and the night we were there they certainly enjoyed it.