Theatre review: Outside Mullingar is a gently restrained tale of two Irish families
Jericho Arts Centre’s production deals with grief, grievances, and lives unlived, but the dramedy remains surprisingly buoyant
Left to right: Adam Henderson, Ryan Cowie, Vanessa Walsh, and P. Lynn Johnson in Outside Mullingar
Honeybee Productions presents Outside Mullingar at Jericho Arts Centre to October 18
IN IRELAND’S MIDLANDS, in the small town of Killucan, the rain never stops, at least if Outside Mullingar’s immersive sound effects are any guide. There, land has stayed with the same families for generations and lore circulates like the wind. It’s a place where “everything is spoken of”, and privacy lives, if anywhere, only within the sanctity of one’s home.
For the Reillys—elderly father Tony and his 40-something son, Anthony—that sanctity is reluctantly shared with their neighbours, Aoife Muldoon and her daughter, Rosemary.
Jericho Arts Centre’s stage builds a little map of that space: a farmhouse kitchen, a gate, a shared well. With the production’s gentle restraint, that’s all this intimate rural Irish dramedy needs to be quietly transportive.
And transported we are, Irish accents and all, to sometime in 2008, the day of the Muldoons patriarch’s funeral. If the air of death often makes people more open, for these two families honesty seems to be the daily weather. In the modest kitchen, Aoife and Tony slip into it easily. And under that easy patter, you can feel the normally brazen Tony circling what he’s been waiting to raise with his freshly widowed neighbour for years: a small strip of land that’s been the bone of contention between the two families for decades.
This play’s most crucial terrain, though, lies beyond the property lines. It’s the unspoken field dividing all four players. Across both homes the same geometry repeats: grief, solitude, grudges, grievances too often aired, and affections too often left unspoken.
The elders speak plainly. Aoife’s tenderness comes with wrought-iron wisdom; actor P. Lynn Johnson brings a gentle touch as the character moves between worrying about her stubborn daughter and grieving her husband. Adam Henderson’s Tony is harsher, though with a prickly charisma. He repeats, in front of anyone who’ll listen, that his son “has no love for the land,” and he’s set on leaving the farm to an American cousin, “a true Reilly” with “hands like feet.”
As the elders debate the future of the houses, it’s the adult children who feel fixed to the land. They both move among ghosts; of departed loved ones, of family expectation, of paths not taken and lives unlived.
It sounds dour, but it isn’t entirely. For all its melancholy, Outside Mullingar is also surprisingly buoyant.
Jonathan Wilde gives the play some air. The rhythm moves between quick and often funny back-and-forth, and pauses that carry weight. Physical gestures also fill in a lot, especially with the men: Tony’s constant shifting in the old armchair inside his shifting home domain, also mirrors his son’s emotional avoidance. Anthony’s character is so closed-off that he comes close to exhausting, but the vulnerability actor Ryan Cowie lets slip saves him and keeps the audience with him, even when he isn’t with himself.
As Rosemary, Vanessa Walsh brings a tense and focused honesty. When the character says that “she’s been older than everyone since the minute [she] was born” you fully believe her.
The four-person cast manages to keep things grounded, even when the show tilts into its most heightened moments, like the revelation during the play’s second half.
Outside Mullingar winds toward a gentle ending; predictable, sure, but the walk there is the point. Like a small-town rumour, the not-knowing and finding out is sometimes more satisfying than the facts. 
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