A few minutes into Keegan Theatre’s revival of “A Couple of Blaguards” it will occur to you, if you didn’t already know, that Frank and Malachy McCourt were anything but blaguards. Their hypercritical mother called them that, and even she probably didn’t mean it. Perhaps she objected to the tales they chose to tell in this theater piece, first penned in the 1980s, of their hard childhood in Limerick, Ireland, and their difficult years as young men in New York….In the play, the brothers are voluble, literary-minded Irishmen with a tragicomic tale to tell, songs to sing and occasional dances to dance.
They enter singing a tune about their ancestral home of Limerick. Born in New York, the brothers moved back to Ireland as tots with their parents and had an impoverished pre-World War II upbringing on a Limerick “lane,” surviving on bread and tea. They lived next door to the disease-ridden public toilet that served the whole street. Their father was an alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job and soon opted for an “Irish divorce” and left. Other siblings often died young. Their grandmother was so bizarrely pious, she made a priest guffaw. There were struggles with alcoholism, love and failed careers before acting called Malachy and teaching called Frank. Both also became writers. (Frank died in 2009.)
It sounds colorful — material not only for their theater piece, but also for Frank’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1996 book, “Angela’s Ashes,” and the 1999 film based on it. Living it must have been quite a different matter, though.
Whether the events they recount are sad, bizarre or comical, the brothers McCourt celebrate the gorgeous reinvention of the English language as spoken by their countrymen…. Leembruggen has fun invoking a mayor of Limerick who advocated for more public urinals for the men “and arsenals for the women.” The piece…..still elicits a laugh and a tear at regular intervals, and is more than just a series of colorful anecdotes. It has power. Its narrative arc follows two talented men from their harrowing childhoods into successful adulthoods, achieved with difficulty and good humor.
At play’s end, Frank and Malachy perform a little coda, excerpting some of the stories they’ve just told. It’s a touching effect that echoes the way memory works — just moments vividly recalled. And we must fill in the rest.
