Kitty and Damnation

Kitty Galloway is roaming the streets of Belfast, blind drunk, in the company of tragedian Edmund Kean. The old Protestant ascendancy are writing elaborate petitions about the dangers of the Catholic Relief Act. Kitty and Damnation by Joseph Crilly is an epic, messy sprawl of a drama, staged with more exuberance than finesse by Giant Olive Theatre. Sex, fame, theatre, religion, murder, journalism and mob justice mingle combustibly in a culture that both celebrates and condemns criminal notoriety. Kitty may or may not be an innocent victim, but her flair for self-dramatisation leaves her perilously exposed to unforgiving fantasies.

The play never quite explains the link between Catholic emancipation and the travails of wayward Kitty, while Rafe Beckley’s production can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a history play, a melodrama or a farce. Too much reliance upon broad comedy blurs the multiplying ironies of Crilly’s self-referential plotting. And there’s an awful lot of ranting and over-acting going on; neither polished enough to be convincingly satiric, nor sufficiently detailed for period reconstruction.

Amid much mugging, Peter Gerald gives a stand-out performance as broadside profiteer Ranseck, dapper, vulgar, gimlet-eyed and seductively plausible in his villainy. Amy Molloy’s Kitty is a frustrating and flightily self-willed ingénue, whose longing to seize centre-stage is eventually realised in the play’s pathetic final movement. And after a long, determined slog through sundry implausible situations, a warm understated humour suddenly illuminates the closing exchange between Ruairi Conaghan’s hardworking Ned and the unsentimental Julie of Charlotte McCurry.

With fewer histrionics, and greater faith in the actors’ ability to make us care, Kitty and Damnation would be a much stronger piece of theatre. It’s a play that tries to do far too much, with limited resources, and only limited success. Still there’s plenty to admire about the ambition of a young company committed to staging new drama that goes beyond the inside of someone’s flat. This desire for epic narratives, entangling the public and the personal, offers the promise of more interesting work to come.