While Owen McCafferty is currently under commission to write the book and lyrics for a musical version of this play, first staged in 1998 by Kabosh, and a film version directed by Terry Loane was released in 2004, the joy of Mojo Mickybo is in the virtuoso performances it inspires and requires from its actors on stage. This production has a pared down staging, with the two actors Chris Grant (Mojo) and Seamus O'Hara (Mickybo) dressed in identical white plimsolls, grey tracksuit bottoms and white t-shirts. The stage is bare except for two chairs with flip chart paper attached to the back, and a screen at the back. The actors, then, have to both create the setting and play the action, switching between numerous roles, across age and gender. They do this through a performance which combines storytelling directly to the audience with a dynamic physicality. McCafferty's distinctive fashioning of Belfast vernacular into a stage language which is at once recognisable and beguiling poetic is a hallmark of the piece.
The storyline follows familiar tropes of the love-across-the barricades Troubles play. Yet it is distinctive in charting the relationship between the eponymous young boys, whose friendship blossoms and dies against the backdrop of Belfast igniting in hate over the summer of 1970. McCafferty makes it difficult to discern which boy is from which community, since neither has yet been marked by sectarian fealty, though of course, the trained Northern ear can tell by listening hard enough and linking the occasional references to locales to specific Belfast locations. For the boys, their Belfast is bounded by the shared narrow streets and alleyways, the nearby Lagan and wasteground where for them only their imaginations run riot. They figure themselves as Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, which fills their attention.
One of McCafferty’s skills as a writer is to convey the ways in which the boys are so thoroughly engaged in the business of play that they are oblivious to the eruptions on the streets and in the lives of their parents. At the same time the audience are made keenly aware of just how the city is literally burning as working-class areas are cleansed along sectarian lines. We are made aware too of how the boys' parents have their own problems, with Mojo’s Ma clinging desperately to the wreckage of her marriage while her husband finds comfort in the arms of the waitress in the ice-cream parlour. Mickybo’s Ma likewise endures her husband’s drinking and the difficulties of making her meagre budget stretch to feed her family through flights of fantasy with which she regales the boys. The arc of the play’s action is to bring the public and private on a collision course which will destroy the friendship that the boys had built.
Both actors revel in the playing of the two boys, demonstrating clarity in their physicalities and their different personalities. The audience's investment in their relationship as the emotional centre and moral barometer is critical, and both actors bring a charm and energy to their performances. Mojo and Mickybo's arch enemies, Gank the Wank and Fuckface, are more cartoonish, producing one of the performance's highlights as the two actors have to switch between the four characters as they fight. This is handled with a precision that delighted the audience.
The adult characters are just as broadly conceived. Here, I think, a trick is missed, with the actors straining at the limits of their technique. While much of the pleasures of the performance come from the comic renditions of adult characters, not all them can be caricatured in the same way. While each has to have a distinctive physical shorthand to allow switching between momentary characterisations, something is lost if they are all played .jpg.aspx%3Fwidth=260&height=190)
at the same pitch. This is particularly the case with Mickybo's Ma. Her high spirited raking has to be established so that when tragedy strikes, the impact is all the more keenly felt. It also struck me that the use of a paper mannequin to represent Mickybo's father seemed a rather arbitrary decision by director David Grant, and required greater dexterity in its handling than the two actors could muster.
These are relatively minor quibbles in what was a sensitive realisation of a demanding script. The two actors never leave the stage and they have to sustain both the verbal flights of McCafferty's writing and the energetic realisation of the play's action under Grant's direction. They cannot be faulted either for their ambition in tackling this project and providing a performance that is well worth seeing.
Tom Maguire is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Ulster.