Review: Rank, Tricycle Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

With the world teetering towards debt-ridden recession, Robert Massey's Rank serves a light-hearted reprimand for excessive financial risk. Standing in for big-time bankers is a rag-bag collection of small-town gamblers and gangsters tangled together in a tightly-wound knot of arrears and affairs. While dryly amusing, Massey’s double-crossing plot struggles in the unwinding, abandoning originality in favour of limp familiarity.

On top of overdue mortgage and credit card instalments, cabbie Carl Conway has racked up several grand's worth of gambling debts with local Irish Mafioso, Jack Farrell. Served with a stern warning from Farrell’s dopey son Fred, Conway enlists the help of colleagues – his father-in-law George Kelly and scruffy lothario ‘Two in the Bush’ – in repaying the debt. With a combination of blind luck and bluff, they aim to turn Conway’s hapless situation around.

There are some exceptional performances within. As Carl, Alan King is a wonderfully overgrown child, as down in the mouth as he is on his luck. His first scene with Bryan Murray, who plays Jack with rigid menace, fizzes with comic chemistry. John Lynn is hilarious as ‘Two in the Bush’, gently lilting his way through rambling monologues and precarious situations with Fred Farrell, with whose wife he has recently slept.

Though Massey’s script is full of deliciously bleak witticisms, waxing lyrical on phone sex lines and Aldi, it is ultimately contained by its own linearity. His delicate build of tension in the first half is entirely undermined by the predictability of the outcome. The problem is that theatre played this straight cannot match the grand twists and connections possible in a multi-layered, quick-cut film.

Despite snappy direction and sharpshooting humour, Fishamble’s production ultimately succumbs to ambitions too lofty. Rank is more writers’ block than Lock, Stock.