Nuns behaving badly: Cecilia Noble (Mother Peter), Kate Lock (Mother Thomas Aquinas) and Clare Cathcart (Mother Basil). Photo by Simon Turtle.
Play: Once a Catholic
Theatre: Tricycle Theatre
Playwright: Mary J. O’Malley
Review by Joy Francis
Mary J. O’Malley’s hearty, provocative and award-winning comedy set in an Irish convent school in 1950s Kilburn is like a risqué Ealing comedy in theatre form.
Written in 1976, and believed to be based on O’Malley’s own tortuous convent school experiences, it makes sense for fellow Catholic survivor, the talented Kathy Burke, to direct it.
The play follows the three ‘hail’ Marys – Mary Mooney (Kathy Burke’s ‘mini me’ Molly Logan), Mary McGinty (Amy Morgan) and Mary Gallagher (Katherine Rose Morley) – over a year as they navigate their sexual awakening and the nuns from hell.
McGinty and Gallagher are precocious, all boyfriends and heavy petting, while Mooney is naive, trusting and wants to excel. Despite her earnestness and desire to understand the religion, Mooney is consistently misunderstood by the nuns, and bullied by psychotic Mother Basil, played with relish by Clare Cathcart. McGinty and Gallagher know how to play the two-faced game. Mooney doesn’t.
On paper Mooney should be the convent’s ideal candidate – academically steady, diligent and disinterested in having boyfriends. Yet she is treated like the biggest sinner in the convent for innocently asking for clarification about sex and reproduction, a reflection of the convent’s shortcomings.
Burke’s energetic and intuitive direction captures the monotony, sexual repression and oppression of convent life through both comic and tragic lens. On a set that resembles a funky chapel for the Village People, and more set changes than Les Miserable, the nuns patrol Our Lady of Fatima like prison guards on the lookout for any indiscretion.
The caustic humour flows easily with some scene stealing performances from Cecilia Noble as the Caribbean Mother Peter whose energetic ‘monologues’ and storytelling in class are Oscar worthy. Father Mullarkey’s impromptu and maniacal testing of the girls’ knowledge of the catechism is turned into comedy gold by the excellent and hilarious Sean Campion.
Cantankerous and eccentric music teacher Mr Emmanuelli (Richard Bremmer) has no interest in the girls who he never calls by their name: “You, the girl with the glasses. National Health.” But he takes a warped shine to Mooney as she can sing, compensating for his failed opera career. Emmanuelli mirrors O’Malley’s underlying message that amid the great demands placed on these girls to be perfect vessels of Christ, they will leave the convent unknown as people.
Holding the show together are the three young leads who shine in Burke’s capable hands. It’s difficult to ignore Molly Logan’s uncanny resemblance to Burke, all red hair, deep voice and facial dexterity. Amy Morgan channels feisty in 3D and Katherine Rose Morley is all seething disregard for the school’s rules.
There is only one criticism, and marginal at that. The play, on occasion, seems overly long (two hours plus), but the energetic and varied direction and high class acting more than compensate.
If you are up for Catholicism on speed, lots of table banging, fear of God-ing and deep belly laughs, then this intelligent and energetic play is for you.
Once a Catholic is at the Tricycle Theatre until 18 January 2014.