HYPOCRISY, WITH A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR
Quaker couple’s life is thrown into turmoil… but was it all that great to start with?
The Sugar Wife Abbey Theatre
Until July 20 ★★★★★
The setting is Dublin 1850, the theme is the wealth made by a Dublin oriental cafe, expanding its business set up with money earned through imports of sugar produced by African slaves. Any resemblance to a similar cafe on Grafton Street is purely intentional.
The play is also a reflection on hypocrisy and exploitation in the 19th Century that could just as easily apply to any age, although the wealth is not quite so restricted now.
The characters are a bunch of people professing virtuous beliefs that don’t always stand the strain of practical living. The passage of time is considered an excuse for a way of life that might otherwise be unacceptable. Yet the American Civil War, in which slavery was still one of the issues, was just 10 years ahead.
The apparently happily married Hannah Tewkley and her husband Samuel are committed Quakers, strong on teachings about simple life, charity and devotion to the faith. They have stripped their home of all unnecessary adornments. Dull simplicity sets the tone of their large house.
Samuel however has his lack of marital fulfilment filled by casual prostitutes. They benefit from his generosity, so what’s the problem? He’s a pragmatist, a good employer and a decent businessman. His wife Hannah is much more sincere in her beliefs. Not having children, she fills the loss by devoting her time to visiting the poverty-stricken inhabitants of the Liberties in Dublin – in particularly the syphilitic Martha, who, as well as needing help, would appreciate having money to follow her sister to America. Hannah is only strong on practical advice, so Martha is not impressed. To extend her duties, Hannah has invited Sarah Worth, a former slave, to live with them while she lectures on the barbarity of slavery. Sarah is accompanied by Alfred, a member of a wealthy family.
He freed Sarah by buying her at a slave market and has abandoned his family attachments and his Quakerism ‘to fight for those still in chains’.
He’s also a budding photographer when photography was only at the daguerreotype stage. In fact Alfred is an insufferable prig who appears to be a pornographer of sorts under the guise of being artistic. Hannah is shocked by the revelation of such baseness, but the former slave Sarah, perhaps the most balanced of them all, is totally pragmatic and knows the value of money – for her it spelt freedom that she’s not going to trade for marriage. The play is full of those apparent contradictions.
‘Intent on living an upright life until she can escape her loveless marriage’
Tierra Porter as Sarah gets centre stage to herself as she gives her lectures, delivered in broken sections throughout the production. Her narration of the trafficking in slaves is a cold-blooded narration of murder, rape, savagery and revenge that leaves little to the imagination.
Peter Gaynor makes a surprisingly likeable Samuel, open about his weakness and his selfcentredness, while retaining the cloak of righteousness.
Siobhán Cullen’s Hannah is a determined woman frustrated by a loveless marriage but intent on living an upright life until she sees a chance to escape. The only problem with the character is that you wonder why she doesn’t see through the priggishness of Chris Walley’s insufferable Alfred. Síofra Ní Éilí’s Martha is both tragic and the source of some unambiguous comments about her would-be helpers.
Stretching to two and a half hours, with some very preachy dialogue at times, the play has its dormant moments. The use at various stages, of red paint on an ocean backdrop, presumably to signify the bloody slave trade is a bit limp, as is the shadow of a bed, which I took to represent the loveless Tewkley home.