The Games People Play

Donald Mahoney 

Irish Theatre Magazine, September 18th 2013

Star rating: ★★★★

Meet Oisin and Niamh: married in their early thirties, parents of a young son and daughter, struggling to pay for groceries and knee deep in negative equity for their Drumcondra abode. Gavin Kostick’s The Games People Play is both a timeless story about two people lost inside a marriage, and a very contemporary Irish horror story of debt, desire and emigration. The drama revolves around an overpriced games set from Argos – pool table, foosball, chess and about 40 other leisure activities – that Oisin is constructing in advance of his son Oscar’s birthday party. As he puts the finishing touches on it, a discussion with Niamh over white wine on everything from their honeymoon and sex life to the menu for the next day’s birthday party turns into an existential conversation on their future together.

Kostick has crafted a slow-burning, riveting snapshot of a middle-class marriage on the brink here, and Quinn and McAnally have the required chemistry for the production to pack a real punch. The pressures of mortgage and unemployment twist tighter on both characters until they reach a metaphorical fork in the road - fight or flight? - that they let hang on a game of chance. Quinn is especially strong as Niamh; her siren-like warning at the play’s end to her husband contemplating a new life in Birmingham cuts right to the bone.

The Games People Play

Emer O’Kelly

Sunday Independent, September 22nd 2013

Gavin Kostick's The Games People Play is what is described as an "old-fashioned well-made play." So perhaps it has no place in the Fringe Festival; on the other hand, it could be said to shine a light on how drama succeeds. It's a Rise production at the New Theatre (transferring to the Viking Sheds in Clontarf), and is a genuinely accomplished and imaginative take on post-boom family destruction.

Oisin and Niamh are treading on eggs in their relationship, separately uneasily aware of how many of their friends' marriages have broken down under financial pressure. Their aspirations and their personal dignity are in shreds as Oisin, a self-employed operator in event management, faces a move to Birmingham in order to meet mortgage payments. But Niamh wants to retrain as a full-time teacher, determined to be a school principal before she is 40.

The crunch-time for what may become a weekend marriage comes on the evening before their son's seventh birthday, as they work their way through the humiliating limitations of post-crash living.

That's it, really; but it is an intense, convincing picture of a contemporary marriage, and it is played extremely well by Lorna Quinn as Niamh, and absolutely superbly by Aonghus Og McAnally as Oisin.

They are directed by Bryan Burroughs.

Fight Night

Joyce McMillan

The Scotsman, 17 May 2012

Tron Theatre Glasgow

Straight from the streets of Finglas, in North Dublin, Gavin Kostick’s one-hour monologue Fight Night – playing at the Tron until tonight – tells what is, for Scottish audiences, an even more familiar story, of a working-class kid robbed of real economic opportunity, for whom boxing represents one way out of poverty, anonymity and self-contempt. Beautifully played by Michael Sheehan, in a hugely athletic and emotionally flawless performance, Dan Coyle represents the third generation in his macho working-class family to bear that name, and to feel the pressure to perform; but after failing to step up for a vital fight six years ago, 28-year-old Dan has lost touch with his parents, and has focused on becoming a full-time Dad to his little son Jordan.

One day, though, little Jordan calls him “Da”, triggering an avalanche of emotion and memory, and motivating Dan to begin to get his fitness back. The play catches him – rippling with muscles, skipping, running, doing press-ups – at the moment when he is about to enter the ring again; but it suggests that, through the love of a good woman, and of his son, Dan may have reached a point where he really can do this for himself, and not only as part of some long power struggle with his father, and his much more talented brother.

In outline, the story is sentimental enough; but in detail, Kostick has a huge amount to say about the dynamics of masculinity in a working-class community where work is scarce, and about the changing set of values by which men now in their twenties have to judge themselves. The show also has a kind of effortless theatricality, as Dan tells his story, and demonstrates his training regime; not complex, not elaborate, not expensive to present, but completely gripping from start to finish.

Fight Night

Neil Cooper

The Herald, 17 May 2012

Tron Theatre Glasgow

The Tron's socially minded Mayfesto season may have been scaled down for this year's incarnation, but it has continued to throw out an array of theatrical firecrackers regardless.

Many of these have been brand new Irish works by writers and companies little-known or seen in Scotland. So it goes with Gavin Kostick's blistering little solo piece about an on-the-ropes young boxer who finally squares up to his family to prove he can go the distance.

Michael Sheehan plays Dan Coyle, a one-time middleweight contender who blew it at the age of 22. After six years of flabby living he's match-fit once more, whatever his estranged old man might think.

Over the course of a week-long workout before he steps back in the ring we're let into Dan's world, a mix of macho pride, hand-me-down defiance and a rediscovering of his mojo via a steadyish relationship and the kid who came with it. If Dan has been shadow boxing for half a decade, as the play opens he's the comeback kid, ready to take on the world.

Bryan Burroughs's production puts Sheehan through his paces over the course of a relentless 55 minutes that see him swagger, skip and shuffle his way through things with an astonishingly well-honed physical dexterity that allows him to flit between characters in an instant. One minute his hands are on his hips as his judgmental Da', the next they're clasped in front of him as his reconciling partner, Michelle. Through all of this Sheehan manages to deliver every nuance of Kostick's words with clarity, wit and a lightness of touch that suggests, as with Dan, he's punching well above his weight.

Fight Night

Peter Crawley

Irish Times, May 12th 2011

Bewleys Cafe Theatre, Dublin 

Never underestimate the potential and pleasure of a well-worn formula. Take the boxing drama, in which a damaged hero has something to prove. Coming from a long line of Finglas boxers that may trace its origin to the invention of the fist, Dan Coyle Jnr – son of Dan Coyle Snr, grandson of Dan Coyle The First – is long out of shape, heavy with grudges and finally spurred by his own fatherhood.

Against the tragic grandeur of comeback kids and has-beens, Dan Jnr is something more banal: a never-was. The brilliance of Gavin Kostick’s writing is to give the heroic form to an ordinary Dan, played by Aonghus Óg McAnally. If anything, the stakes get lower – first, he’s fighting for the middleweight champion of the world (“I am in me hole”) then simply to get fit. But the monologue, structured like the rounds of a boxing match, makes his private stakes higher: breathing hard through fitness struggles, tensely squaring up to his estranged father, steadily claiming an identity as a responsible family man.

Written specifically for McAnally – the son of performer Aonghus McAnally, grandson of the great actor Ray McAnally – any similarity to persons living or dead is intentional. That brings a bracing shiver to the line, “Me name has got me to this level, but not me”, yet the performance’s real impact is more universal and brutal. When it comes to the title bout of self definition, a son’s opponent is his father and here McAnally and Kostick deliver a knockout blow: “No man can fight his own da when both are in their prime and that’s the tragedy.”

The play’s psychology isn’t always deft: one dream sequence is so basted with symbolism that even Dan compliments his subconscious. But director Bryan Burroughs steadies the explication with the eloquence of physicality.

Fight Night’s final, wordless moments are its most extraordinary, McAnally’s release so stark, exhilarating and cathartic that Colm Maher’s lights dip too quickly, the music arriving too soon. We don’t need to see McAnally land a punch to know what he’s fighting for. We’re up there in the ring with him.

Runs until June 11th 

Fight Night

Emer O’Kelly

Sunday Independent, May 15th 2011

A play about boxing... with charm? Yes, if it’s Fight Night by Gavin Kostick, a Rise Production directed by Bryan Burroughs and lit by colm Maher, currently running at Bewley’s Lunchtime Café Theatre in Dublin.

Which makes me wonder if it rings an authentic note to members of the boxing world in the audience. As someone who regards boxing – professional or amateur – as licensed interactive savagery, I can’t help wondering if they wouldn’t find it wimpish and sentimental. Be that as it may, it’s a smashing little play, even if some of the imagery is a bit contrived.

Dan is a third generation boxer from Finglas in Dublin. Neither his father nor his grandfather really hit the heights, although good in their day and place. But his brother Sean was an Olympic Bronze Medallist, and Dan always has laboured under his father’s disappointed expectations. Dan Pere even suspects that Dan Junior deliberately ricked his ankle just before a fight when he was 22, due to having lost his bottle. Six years later, with a nice girlfriend and a little son whom he adores, Dan is itching to prove himself.

But first he has to get fit. And in an extraordinary display of eye-blinking activity, Aonghus Og McAnally plays most of the piece in strict training mode; he breaks a sweat, yes (does he ever!), but he never seems to experience the slightest breathing difficulty. And every line, aside, and reflective sad little thought is delivered with bell-like clarity. It’s vocal technique that makes you purr in this sloppy theatrical era.

Of course, the story is simplistic and happy ever after. And I loved it, complete to the moment when the worm turns, and Dan Junior, despairing of proving verbally that he “was never scared of being hit” delivers his bullying father a haymaker. That a man with any sense should be scared of being hit is beside the point.

Fight Night

Caomhan Keane

Entertainment.ie, May 13th 2011

"No man can ever fight their Da when both are in their prime. And that’s the tragedy." So says Dan son of Dan son of Dan (played by Aonghus son of Aonghus son of Ray) in Fight Night, the Little Gem winning play from this year's Absolut Fringe Festival which runs at Bewley's Cafe Theatre untilJune 11th. An hour long workout with a monologue woven through it, it charts the return to the ring of a wayward fighter who walked away from it all six years before following a blow out with his Da moments before a championship fight.

Following the birth of his own son he's drawn back to the family trade and made to square up to the questions that fire the 'excuse voice" in his head. And as he questions what role his name played in getting him to the level he is currently at (while also questioning the role it played in preventing him becoming the fighter he could have been) he ponders why he's pulled the gloves back on in the first place. Is it about earning his father's long lost respect? Is it so his son Jordan can look him in the eye when he grows up? Or is it a love of the sport that drives him after all?

As part of the Show in a Bag initiative launched by Fishamble last year, the piece was specifically written for Aonghus Og McAnally based on his own proposal and while this lends the production a certain richness, it stops short of answering any questions we might have about the gift one generation passes onto the next. The piece works best when exploring the questions of self worth that come with being one of many and when Dan Jnr wonders if what he was lacking, when it came to having "it", was psychological he leaves us in as much doubt as he is himself.

It's a terrific turn from a beautiful actor who engages the audience by eyeing them directly, only breaking eye contact when drifting off in thought, taking us with him. He skips, spars and does press ups sending sweat flying as he spins a tale you've heard a zillion times before but it's done so simply and honestly you are more than willing to lend your ears to it all over again.

There are plenty of plays that look at what happens when Daddy wasn't there. Here's one that looks at what happens when he was. And the fresh set of problems that are there to be conquered. Bryan Burrough’s assured direction and McAnally’s everyman portrayal assure that he is given his due.

Fight Night

Harvey O'Brien  

Irish Theatre Magazine, May 10th 2011

Fight Night is a straightforward piece of storytelling exploring the mind/body dynamic of an Irish male boxer who fights inside and outside the ring for much the same reasons. This is a classic narrative/psychological archetype that dates, if not quite to antiquity, to far enough back in the popular consciousness to fulfill Rise Production's stated aims to reinvestigate quintessentially Irish stories with universal potential.

Near the climax, Daniel Coyle III, known as 'Dan Junior' (performed by Aonghus Óg McAnally) reflects on the drama that defines his life in the shadow of his boxer father, grandfather, and brother: "No man can fight his Da when he's in his prime, and that's the tragedy." Maybe tragedy is pushing it. It is certainly a dramatic dialectic between body and spirit in which the anxiety of patriarchal succession literally embodied in pugilism weighs heavily upon the protagonist, who must evaluate himself relative to past and present conflicts and his capacity to overcome each of them. In the end, the real question is whether he can transcend the paradigm at all in plotting his future.

The show begins with the faint smell of sweat in the room, presumably a remnant of McAnally's rehearsal/warm up. He spends the bulk of this show exercising: performing the rituals of a boxer in training, honing his body in preparation for conflict. He skips, jogs, does press-ups, and shadow boxes with weights - all for real. Meanwhile, with what must be sincerely admired as tremendous fortitude, the actor keeps up a monologue describing the psychological battle the character is waging in fairly obvious parallel to his physical action.

Director Bryan Burroughs must have either a kind or cruel streak in pacing the piece, which breaks into several 'days' leading up to an ultimately unseen final bout during which he changes up the exercises to ever-more gruelling routines. With additional fight coaching from Cathal Redmond, McAnally manages to render a convincing manifestation of the physical boxer. The action never becomes dull, nor does it seem like unnecessary business. Yet this devotion to realism does overwhelm the cerebral side. McAnally isn't able to bring much nuance to his vocalisations as he balances verbal and physical expression, with the notable exception of the finale as he gives indirect voice to the character of Coyle's wife, who provides insight, balance, and tenderness in this unashamedly gruff and hypermasculine landscape.

In fact the show's one step outside the rooted physical domain and into the realm of fantasy is a dream sequence that seems doubly redundant. Though it allows Burroughs and McAnally to explore a different register of movement (McAnally mimes the disconnected gestures of a dream-body, flailing at phantoms, failing to walk), the psychic phantasms against which the character rails are wholly unsurprising. We know from the instant the show begins what kind of play we have here, and this journey wholly inside the mind doesn't add much, though it is well executed.

This more or less sums up the show, which is good, solid storytelling with good, solid craftsmanship and good, solid, hardworking acting from a good, solid script. There’s no revelation or uniqueness here, but there is a communicative and well-rendered execution of a familiar set of conventions.