Gates of Gold

CLOSE SHAVE Rayner, right, gets razor burn.

For his imminent death, the central figure of Frank McGuinness’s decidedly drosslike Gates of Gold expects a suitable send-off. The aging Gabriel (Martin Rayner) has done it all—played a hundred parts, outfaced homophobic Ireland by living openly with his husband Conrad (Charles Shaw Robinson) and founded a beloved theater. Unfortunately, his thrilling life is coming to a suffocating close. Perhaps it is appropriate that this tale of a dying diva, styling himself as Desdemona, leaves us feeling like an audience of innocents being smothered, slowly, with a blanket.

The lovers are meant to be portraits of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, founders of Dublin’s Gate Theatre. Perhaps a bored fly on the wall would have been drowsily interested in these theatrical figures exchanging cheap ripostes like, “You started it.” “How?” “You loved me.…” but it’s unlikely. It’s best to ignore entirely the ridiculously drawn peripheral characters (a spitfire nurse who, according to my notes, revealed her painful secret in a speedy quarter of an hour), though it’s difficult when McGuinness insists on irritating split-screen simultaneous scenes. These clumsily ensure that half the stage is usually full of silent, vamping actors, trying not to step all over their colleagues’ lines.

Kent Paul’s production thins an already anemic script by casting the claylike Robinson, into whose impassive presence Rayner’s zingers sink and vanish. Rayner himself, like the underutilized Diane Ciesla, displays real (if intermittent) charm. But any prospector worth his pan will tell you: Two nuggets don’t make a lode.
—Helen Shaw

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