Personal politics
Two Rooms is a compelling piece of theatre, writes Colin Murphy
As the city is bombed, a small corner of Beirut is preserved in the small attic theatre at Andrew's Lane in Dublin. It's Beirut in 1988, not today, but no matter. What initially seems to be a dated and heavy-handed account of the kidnapping of an American university lecturer in Beirut turns out to be a gripping and incisive portrait of personal tragedy and the politics surrounding it. The recent movie Syriana might give you a more layered and up-to-date account of US and Middle Eastern politics, but turn to Lee Blessing's play for a more intimate insight.
Two Rooms is set in two rooms: the cell where the lecturer is being held in Beirut and a room in the US home he shared with his wife. She is visited there by a persistent journalist and by a hostile State Department official. He receives no visits, but occupies himself talking to his wife, himself, the walls, the audience. The play weaves between them, building a convincing portrait of his incarceration, her trauma, and the politics in which both are implicated.
Though the impetus of the play seems political – and at times, especially in the words of the journalist, it verges on being didactic and predictable – it is strongest at its most personal. As in Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling, the most compelling aspect of the hostage's incarceration is not the horror, but the humanity that it lays bare. The hostage, alys blindfolded, tells us how he gets through the days, what he imagines, what he remembers. It is vivid, moving, occasionally funny. In Simon Coury's understated performance, the play seems very true. Ann Sheehy, as his wife, is passionate but never hysterical.
The journalist and official are cyphers for the politics: for the journalist, the politics of the small man oppressed by the state – in this case, the hostage whom the government is ignoring because he is not a priority in negotiations – and for the official, the politics of hard-core foreign-policy "realism", the school of thought that says you deal with who you have to and act only in the interests of the state, not of individual principles or ideologies.
This allows Lee Blessing to write great lines, the kind of taut, loaded dialogue people only speak in politically-charged movies. But it also allows director Mary Moynihan and the actors to resort to leftie dramatic clichés: Phelim Drew is the campaigning journalist (good) and Una Kavanagh is the cold-hearted securocrat (bad). In this, the play is better than the production it receives. Both journalist and official are more rounded characters in the script than those that appear on stage. The journalist's motivation is dubious, the prospect of a Pulitzer Prize hanging over his attempts to get the wife to do an interview; the official's justifications of the State Department's action are cogent and credible, not without moral force. Drew hints at this complexity in his character, but Kavanagh's every word is curt and cold, and the character is the lesser for this predictability.
The production would be stronger were there more nuance in the interpretation but it remains a compelling piece of theatre, performed with conviction and staged with deft simplicity.