Review: Meetings With The Monk – A Play, A Pie and A Pint

Brian James O’Sullivan‘s self-penned Meetings With The Monk, is a curious creature, a hybrid of play, storytelling, and autobiographical novel. It would, I am quite sure, make a rather tremendous radio play. It is a meta-play, blurring the lines between Brian the playwright, and Brian the character. It’s a story being told to the audience without any semblance of a fourth wall, the bones of its construction laid out for inspection. Gemma Patchett and Jonny Scott’s set recollects a disassembled set not long pulled out of storage, accordingly emphasising a ‘deconstructed’ feel to proceedings.

The play, suiting its lunchtime hour restriction, draws upon a single episode in Brian’s life. Meetings With The Monk opens on a suicide note, fomenting a search for some remedy which leads him to a monastery. Taking the lead from his departed grandmother, Brian is revisiting the Catholic world of his youth with limited expectations but little to lose. There he will find a brotherhood of men more varied in personality than expected, and a surprisingly appealing order to life.

O’Sullivan is an assured presence on stage, utterly in control of proceedings and readily charming his audience. There’s just a touch of the storytelling comedian to his patter, a wry attitude which creates swift familiarity. His play is…risky, but not because of the subject matter. Finding a fresh perspective through conversations with a remarkable, and down-to-earth mentor is well well-worn dramatic fayre.

On the other hand, wizards tend to look far less impressive once the curtain is drawn back, and their secrets laid bare. However, O’Sullivan is playing a cunning game, folding both ‘Brians’ into a single thoughtful memoir, the play simply a means to focus his self-reflections. The story naturally touches on themes of mental ill-health, and humanity’s advancing isolation, but doesn’t exist to serve these.

Director Laila Noble orchestrates a pacey, dynamic performance, Brian never allowed to grow immobile or declamatory. There’s clarity at all times, and a sense of progress towards a well-defined conclusion. Life, of course, rarely provides tidy conclusions, but Meetings With The Monk finds a satisfactory point at which to draw down the curtain.

However, the play is concerned with journey, not destination. Along the way O’Sullivan creates a compact, but diverse cast of characters, shading the drama with gentle humour, a little pathos, and a touch of play. Conversely, the titular ‘meetings’ with the monk called Felix are perhaps over-gilded. The audience has long since accepted the absence of other actors when recordings are introduced to give voice to the monk.

Ultimately, O’Sullivan’s Meetings With The Monk doesn’t promise answers to society’s ills, and neither should it. However, it does achieve a 21st-century representation of the religious life absent of the cynicism or fluffiness typically found on stage and screen. Brian’s journey from suicide note to just a little faith in his future is relatable, as is the power of human connection, and order, to facilitate that change.

Meetings With the Monk is produced by A Play, a Pie and a Pint at Òran Mór, co-presented with the Traverse theatre