REVIEW: Rock Doves (UK Premiere)

Theatre goers arrived at CRAIC last night with high expectations: Marie Jones’ latest play debuting, Adrian Dunbar treading the Coalisland boards, Tony award nominee Ian McElhinney directing, and the promise of all the action taking place in a derelict Belfast flat. Few left disappointed, if any. Jones has triumphed once again with a script that is full of characters that the audience care about within seconds of them arriving on stage.
The play sees alcoholic Knacker (Dunbar) forced to share his squat with a young lad (Matthew McElhinney) who is in hiding from paramilitaries. Knacker has a long term friend in Bella (Carol Moore), with whom he drinks and fights with, but it’s easy to see that they appreciate each other’s company and depend on one another. With the usual injection of Jones’ comedy comes Lillian, Bella’s transvestite brother, who makes his money as a Tina Turner tribute act.
Arguably a little slow to start, the play has some stand out pieces of dialogue and a few effective motifs throughout. One humerous exchange early in the play between Knacker and The Boy drew raucous laughter from the audience, as Knacker defends his decision not to wash. The relationship between Knacker and The Boy is one of the many victories in this play.
Moore depicted the character of Bella convincingly and made her extremely likeable, with a lazy accent and in a perfect costume. A very unfortunate sort, she says that after running away from home she always wanted someone to come and find her or wonder where she was. Very sad indeed. But in true Jones style this is followed up with her saying that it was typical that, when someone was looking for her, it was a brother who turned out to be a transvestite that needed her help.
Knacker refers to his drink as his wife throughout, and talks about turning the TV on and watching various programmes despite there not being a plug. He then goes off on tangents shouting, “Repeat, repeat.” His annoyance of things being repeated is actually a successful element to the play. In the closing minutes of the play, the idea of the TV being turned on is once again revisited. However, this time Knacker tells Bella to “wise up”.
Although it becomes clear very early that The Boy is running away from paramilitaries, it isn’t clear what side he’s on. Some audience members believed for a time that he was a dissident republican in the present day, only realizing that he is a protestant when he starts talking about the bonfire in the run up to “the celebration” as Jones subtly calls it. I have no doubt that this ambiguity is a deliberate effort by Jones to convey that everyone is bad as each other and that it doesn’t matter what religion The Boy is, but that the audience should identify with him regardless.
So many little details make this play brilliant. From Knacker being irritated at a button falling off his coat, to the excellent choice of music by Ennio Morricone between scenes. The Morricone music is from the film ‘Once upon a time in the West’, and this theme runs through Knacker’s playing of a harmonica, as Charles Bronson plays the same instrument in the film. The most powerful scene in the play is one in which Bella and Knacker are dancing as he plays the harmonica and it is cut short by gun shots.
That scene perhaps sums of the entire production: A mixture of emotions, from the highs of euphoria, laughter and friendship, to the lows of pity, depression and alcoholism.
Marie Jones can certainly write a script and everyone needs to see this one.
However, the one thing that this play needs is a box of herbal cigarettes, as there isn't a group of people on this Earth that look more like smokers than Knacker, Bella, Lillian and The Boy.
Hurry up with the next one Marie.