Fly Me To The Moon – women bear the burden, and also carry the can (Lyric Theatre until Sunday 25 August)

In Fly Me To The Moon, Marie Jones writes about women who are literally doing the heavy lifting in their households. She writes about women who don’t earn much more than the minimum wage and are the ones who put the money aside to pay the household rent. They’re the women who are always on the lookout for a way to earn a few bob extra or save a pound or two.

“I dream about money, Francis, don’t you?”

One of the women praises her son for his entrepreneurial spirit: overlooking the criminal nature of his moneymaking schemes, but applauding the fact that a man in her family has got of his backside to try. The other woman is sacrificing her holiday – a friend’s far too elaborate hen weekend – to make sure her working class daughter doesn’t have a second-class experience at the grammar school she qualified to study at. Both hope that the next generation won’t suffer the poverty that their parents continue to endure.

Francis and Loretta are care assistants, travelling around people’s homes to make sure they’re washed and dressed, fed and put to bed. Their clients are sometimes heavy. And in the case of Davy Magee, they don’t get much feedback. But the women still go beyond what they’re paid to do, collecting his pension, placing his bets at the bookies, and buying him the paper so he can check the racing results.

They’re women who in the face of poverty don’t slump down in a chair and let the depression wash over them. Instead, they keep going. Francis turns a blind eye to deceit that she views as victimless. Loretta’s first reaction is to sense the shame, but her everyday reality helps her push through the barrier of guilt.

But Marie Jones sets a trap. When Davy becomes rather permanently indisposed, there’s almost a game-show feel to the increasingly value of the prizes that are dangled in front of the women. Finding a way to twist their consciences around accepting one offer opens the morally corrupt door to another larger ill-gotten gain. Soon Francis and Loretta are in over their heads. By the second act, there’s almost a sense of pantomime to the scale of what they’re considering doing. They are overthinking the opportunity while being blind to the consequences.

Nine years after first seeing Fly Me To The Moon, I came away with a different sense of feelings. I’m older for one thing. But the state of economy also feels poorer and more fractured. There’s been some gentle modernisation – memory sticks are mentioned at one point, though the counterfeit films appear on physical DVDs later on.

In 2024, it feels much more harsh to brand care workers as potential fraudsters. Their lack of pay progression is much more widely understood. Their profession’s courageous resilience through the Covid pandemic, continuing to tend to and serve their clients, is still appreciated. But it’s the jokes related to colleagues with different ethnic backgrounds that land least well, even more so in the immediate aftermath of anti-immigration protests in the cities of Belfast and Bangor. But these changing sensibilities don’t make Fly Me To The Moon a bad play, even when it continues to be set in the present day.

The ending is structurally the shakiest part of the direction and the script. Practically, excited and premature audience applause at what seemed like the incendiary finale drowned out a final short scene that should have wrapped up the story, so its context was lost to many of us in the audience. (That on top of first night sound issues that left those at the back of the theatre without sufficient amplification of the actors’ voices … something that was mostly fixed during the interval.) But dramatically, the final 10-15 minutes set up a situation where (and I’m being careful not to give away too much detail of the plot) important papers and notes are left sitting in a box on the bed, likely to be totally destroyed, but also left there because they could be found. When your brain has to think so hard to rationalise what feel like contradictory plot elements, there’s probably something that could be improved.

Marie Jones’ script successfully keeps the audience’s empathy in place while ever more kindling is thrown onto the farcical fire. In the final minutes of the play the care workers discover more about Davy than they’ve garnered over the years they’ve been coming in and out of his house. That’s the biggest shock of the show.

Katie Tumelty – for whom the role was originally written – allows the scheming Francis to be a gentle bully, pushing her colleague into doing things she can’t abide, and keeping her onside. Maria Connolly expertly portrays a hyperventilating Loretta who continually goes against her own instincts. On opening night, the quickfire retorts weren’t quite as sharp and pacey as they’ll no doubt become with further performances in front of an audience who regularly interrupt proceedings with generous laughter. And there’s a certain amount of cheating going on, looking at each other through the partial walls of Davey’s flat, instead of ‘listening’ through the doorway between the kitchen and the bedroom.

Fly Me To The Moon is produced by Patrick Talbot Productions and Rathmore Productions. It’s written and directed by Marie Jones. Performances continue at the Lyric Theatre until Sunday 25 August.

Photo credit: Kasia Rogoweic

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