Wishing his daughter well for a ceremonial marriage, WB Yeats observed that “arrogance and hatred are the wares peddled in the thoroughfares”, and the American playwright Thomas Babe (who died in 2000) took this sentiment, as well as his title, from that resonant poem. Babe’s 1977 play – seen here at the Royal Court a year later – is set on a hot and steamy Fourth of July in a downtown New York police station, where two cops and two crooks are locked in a system of interrogation that gradually broadens into a debate about masculinity, the woman within the man and, more specifically, the man within the daughter.
If the writing were not so powerful and poetic, you could deduce the play was a little over-schematic in its gay wish-fulfilment set-up. Frank Kelly (Matthew Marsh), the alcoholic Irish desk sergeant, is in a frenzy of anxiety over one suicidal daughter while another daughter is staying unhelpfully put in Vermont. His sidekick Jack Delasante (Corey Johnson) has two daughters of his own, and three former wives.
Their handcuffed charges – the philosophical Sean Cohn (Sean Chapman) and his angelic junkie protégé Jimmy Rosario (Colin Morgan) – are held on suspicion of having murdered an old dry-cleaning lady. Questioning becomes confession, though not about the murder, as Jack supplies Jimmy with a shot of the Dialudid he keeps in the office and Sean prompts a soft response from Jack with his story of cradling a dead colleague in Nam.
A similar pieta is re-enacted by Frank and the naked Jimmy with literally explosive results and a shaky reaffirmation of the pecking order. When I saw the first production (the cast included the late Donal McCann and Antony Sher as the cops and Kevin McNally as Jimmy), I proclaimed another great new American dramatist following Rabe, Mamet and Shawn.
Although Babe remained fairly prolific, none of his other plays, to my knowledge, has been seen here. My theory is that in A Prayer for My Daughter he said all he wanted to say about his own volatile sexuality, and parenthood, and he did so with such perfect weight and dramatic instinct that there was nothing more to add.
Dominic Hill’s production is brilliantly acted in a reconfigured Young Vic, Giles Cadle’s perfect design pressing down on the action and ranging the audience on two sides of a long thin acting area. Marsh presents a testy, bullish, sweaty exterior while Johnson and Chapman find beautiful nuance in their overlapping confessions. And Colin Morgan, who made a sensational debut here last year in Vernon God Little and crossed the road to the Old Vic in All About My Mother, is hypnotically pathetic and trembling as he, too, talks all about his daughter.
- Michael Coveney
