Review: Bondi Beach Boy Blue

Benny McDonnell’s first play Bondi Beach Boy Blue initially premiered way back in 2008 to critical acclaim from sports personalities (including former GAA president Nickey Brennan and Kilkenny manager Brian Cody) and theatre buffs alike (having been described as “Playboy of the Western World meets Philadelphia Here I Come”).

Its fourth run began last week in the Wexford Opera House, where it will finish up this Satuday before moving to the Tivoli Theatre in Dublin for 3 weeks. To find out how to win a pair of tickets for the August 13^th performance, keep reading!

Based around a Kilkenny hurler, his best friend, and the antics they get up to, Bondi is a four-actor, six-character play, with little apart from cúpla camáin by way of props. Even with such sparsity, however, Benny has managed to create a vivid retrospective similar in some respects to Brian Friel’s Faith Healer.

The play itself is split between Kilkenny and Australia. The first half is based in Ireland and tells of Declan and Gary’s combined success on the pitch and the tragedy which befalls them, effectively ending their hurling careers. After a brief interval, we are taken to the 35^th county (Bondi) where we follow the boys on their Australian adventure and get to observe them during the run-up to the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000.

It’s astounding how, with a few carefully written and fabulously delivered lines (which, in the case of Aoife Coghlan, either came in a perfect young and innocent Irish voice or a more mature English accent, neither of which ever faltered, even when the characters’ appearances were only separated by enough time to change costume), an almost empty stage could either be the dark interior of a Sydney bar or the wide, green expanse of a hurling pitch.

Bondi’s script provides copious moments of laughter as well as real poignancy during the second half, and by the curtain call, my heart was in my mouth, my eyes were watering with compassion for the characters on stage and the situations which they had found themselves in, and my sides hurt from laughing at the real chemistry between all of the cast.

One of the high points of the play for me was the hurling montage during the first act. Not only do the boys pose in various tableaus which show classic hurling poses that wouldn’t be out of place on the walls of the GAA Museum in Croke Park but in the background, Lisa (Declan’s girlfriend) and his dad change their stance and expression between each blackout, really giving an immersive sense of the action taking place on the pitch.

Benny professes that although Bondi is “dyed in Black and Amber and steeped in hurling“ (for example, when Declan’s father questions him about ending a relationship, he is met with a simple ‘there’s plenty more ash on the sideline’), it’s more a coming-of-age/rites-of-passage story which draws heavily on anecdotes from Benny’s life and the lives of those around him. The story focuses on a boy’s relationship with his father more than it does on hurling – as McDonnell states, the sport is incidental; “if it was set in Kerry, it’d be football. Notre Dame in America? American football, and so on.”

Originally hailing from Mayo, Benny feels that he is fully entitled to and capable of writing a play centred around hurling – a sentiment which was affirmed by the uncrowned King of hurling – Brian Cody. During its first run, both Brian Cody and Eddie Keher attended the play on the same night in Kilkenny. Although Cody was initially dubious of McDonnell’s work, during the interval, Cody shook his hand and professed that although McDonnell was a Mayo man, he definitely knew his hurling.

As a boy, McDonnell was ‘mad about hurling,’ not to mention that both his cousin and uncle hurled for Galway in their time. Subsequently, in college in Galway he made some great friends who hailed from Kilkenny and attended match after match with them, writing the part of Declan (Bondi’s protagonist) with one of them in mind. Tragically, Dave Greene passed away before he could tread the boards in Bondi, and so the play was dedicated to his memory (For those of you who love a bit of trivia, Aoife Coghlan – who plays both female roles – hails from the same town in Kilkenny as Greene did).

McDonnell studied English in NUIG and found himself drawn to theatre modules again and again, slowly developing a love for interesting and colloquial turns of phrase which can be used so effectively in scriptwriting. Benny was astounded when one of his lecturer’s took a great interest in “pages and pages of dialogue [he] had thrown together based on the craic the lads [he] was living with were having,” and her encouragement was enough to keep him centred on scriptwriting, rather than branching into novels or other genres.

This focus on the spoken word is part of what makes Bondi Beach Boy Blue, to my mind, so like The Faith Healer. Not only is the entire play a retrospective on a particular chapter in the lives of the protagonists, but each event is only really brought to life by the interaction between the actors’ words and the audience member’s imagination. As well as this, enjoyment is really contingent upon how lines are delivered, with each character also adding a particular (and new) perspective to the stories told.

With a bad cast, my companion and I agreed, the play would not work at all. However, the current cast rise to the challenge of bringing the story to life and the result of their combined efforts is a wonderfully funny yet heartwrenching play, well worth seeing.

Though Bondi is Benny’s first fully produced play, he has written others and one – The Contenders – enjoyed a public reading in the New Theatre last year, after which it was looked at in depth by the Abbey, so it may not be long before we see something new from the man who can bring a coming-of-age story so vibrantly alive (and if you can’t wait that long, there’ll be a public reading of another of McDonnell’s plays in the New Theatre in October this year).

And for those of you who want to go, just post a comment below answering the following question to be in with a chance to win two tickets to Bondi Beach Boy Blue in the Tivoli Theatre on August 13^th:

What colours is Bondi Beach Boy Blue steeped in, despite its misleading title?..

UPDATE (11-8-10): The competition is now closed and the winner has been notified. Thank you all for taking part!

‘Bondi Beach Boy Blue’ runs in the Jerome Hynes Theatre, Wexford until Saturday, and in the Tivoli Theatre Dublin from August 10th til September 4th. Click Here for box office information.