Think Gerry Ryan, think monster. Think sleaze, excess and a larynx drawling like gurgling butter. Unfairly or not, our images of public figures are reflexive mental sketches, biased towards the last we heard of them. One of the triumphs of this new play by Hugh Travers is to convincingly imagine a Gerry Ryan without any of these associations. It is an impressive feat of empathy.
In 1987, Ryan, a late-night DJ for Radio 2, is roped into spending a week in the wilds of Connemara with three volunteers in a proto-Survivor reality-radio segment for The Gay Byrne Show. When young Gerry announces to Auntie Gaybo and a nation of listeners that he has had to kill and eat a lamb to survive, a summer’s outcry ensues. Lambo’s tightly written hour of theatre orbits around the question of whether Ryan’s career will survive a classic case of media “silly season”. Michael Ford Fitzgerald gives an adrenalised performance as the voice and embodiment of Ryan’s memories, at its funniest when lam(b)pooning Gaybo, RTÉ bigwigs and a moralising public. What emerges is something much more than the Fringe-y one-man show promised by the programme and tight confines of the New Theatre. Elevated by Ronan Phelan’s clever directorial choices in lighting and sound, Travers’ script has turned a hoary old bit of Montrose gossip into a sharp satire of Ireland’s relationship with its media. Once the outrage has died down, Ryan is quietly offered a prime spot on morning radio, where he goes on to reign for the next twenty years. Any monster, the play suggests, is our creation.
