Tea In A China Cup – getting out the good china from 1983 for a fresh brew (Lyric Theatre until Saturday 30 May)

As part of the Lyric Theatre’s 75th anniversary programme, Christina Reid’s 1983 play Tea in a China Cup is being restaged. Back then she was the theatre’s playwright-in-residence (1983/4) and one of just four female playwrights to have their work produced by the Lyric during the 1980s. One of just four women playwrights in a decade!

Tea In A China Cup is a play about working-class Ulster Protestant women penned by a working-class Ulster Protestant woman who lived in Ardoyne. To borrow from one of the script’s recurring themes, it’s as if the play has been trapped in one of the wooden cabinets with glass shelves dotted around the walls of the Lyric Theatre’s public areas, like the ‘best’ china tea set that no one uses. And more than 40 years later, someone has had the nerve to open the door and lift out a cup and saucer.

This is a play full of sorrow that follows three generations of women in a family. History repeats itself with dangerous military service (across world wars and the Troubles), husbands with little respect for their wives, and a strong sense that the first rule of Protestant club is to never let yourself down in front of other people.

Everything is viewed through the eyes of Beth. When she’s not in the heart of a scene, Amy Molloy lurks to the side, either crouched down or peering down on the action from high up on the multi-storey set. Poverty has constrained Beth’s education along with her wider family’s social mobility. It’s easy to forget that the play is set in North Down rather than north Belfast. Perhaps true to her own Ardoyne environs, Reid writes in a best friend for Beth, Catholic girl Theresa (Louise Parker), who seems to have the best of everything, but who we will discover ultimately also lives under her own family’s omertà and suppresses her actual circumstances when back home from London.

Beth was apparently born asking ‘why?’ and as her character matures, Molloy finds new ways to question difference and physically react to the hypocrisy around her and the perennial absence of fulsome answers. Will she ever find relief from the burden of carrying around everyone else’s past lives? Again, an attitude that will have seemed more novel and x in 1983 than 2026.

The play’s narrative crashes together flashbacks like a script dropped on the floor with its pages picked up in a random order. In the present, Mum Sarah (a brilliant Mary Moulds) is facing the final months of her life with great fortitude. With effort she moves from her bed to a window to watch the bands go past on the Twelfth. Director Dan Gordon starred in the 1983 production. His decades-long work with bands brings the authentic sound of Mourne Young Defenders Flute Band into Chris Warner’s vivid soundscape. (The Lyric’s spatial audio system is put to good use throughout, though the sound of cars going past being placed above the audience’s heads felt jarring.)

Marie Jones has a twinkle in her eye playing Beth’s grandmother, with some great conspiratorial scenes shared with Great Aunt Maisie (Katie Tumelty). The remainder of the cast play family members, council workers and neighbours. Maria Connolly sets a flippant tone as a cemetery department clerk with a bouffant hairdo and a comedy-sized magnifying glass. She later garners more laughs as a costly fortune teller.

One generation’s loss during a world war is followed by the next’s loss of homes as the Troubles begin. Simon Sweeney sympathetically portrays two generations of young men heading away to army training – cherished figures with pride of place on the wall of the family home – with the first departure particularly touching. John Paul Connolly is the more trouble-than-he’s-worth grandfather, while Matthew Forsythe appears in a number of roles including a British Army officer struggling to protect homes under threat.

Ciarán Bagnall’s spinning and sliding set and lighting design cast vivid slabs of light through open doorways in dark building with the cast needing to take care to hit their mark precisely to keep their faces illuminated in the narrow beams. The homes on either side of the stage neatly rotate, revealing perilous ladders that that put your heart in your mouth as you watch cast members clamber up and down. (The forced perspective works well, though I almost expect Scrooge from the Lyric’s recent festive productions to step through at any moment.)

Death rituals and lousy sex education are familiar topics in modern theatre. Shame may still be a driving force in families, but is secrecy still as prevalent? Tea In A China Cup often feels like a play of its time. What producer today would entertain commissioning a play with such a large cast (nine)? Yet its restaging is a much-needed reminder that women are still under-represented in almost every aspect of Irish theatre (except costume design), but will contribute so much when not actively frozen out.

If she was allowed to break the fourth wall, Beth might ask why this play was chosen from the archives to be revamped and presented to fresh audiences? A women-led story on a Belfast stage is almost as unusual then as it is now: Cuckoo-Land is a recent exception. When first staged, the brazen and unfiltered anti-Catholic bigoted utterances of the main characters must have been shocking and almost fearless. But what about today? How much has changed? Those lines of dialogue – sometimes funny, sometimes almost too crass to be comfortable – are a reminder of how far society has come. Sectarianism is by no means dead, but it’s much diluted and has largely moved beyond simple beliefs that people from the ‘other side’ are lazy and don’t have good personal hygiene. Yet communities are still apt to be swayed by fear and difference over hope and cohesion.

Tea In A China Cup continues its run at the Lyric Theatre until Saturday 30 May.

Photo Credit: Neil Harrison

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