Stones in His Pockets has been running in London since last year and will continue until February at least. The premise, for those who have not heard, is thrifty and fun: An American film production company arrives in a small town in County Kerry to make a movie, and hires local villagers to fill crowd scenes. Stones tells the story of the shoot entirely through two such extras, Charlie and Jake (Kieran Creggan and Kieran Lagan), who play themselves – and everyone else.
    Even before Stones became popular, there was plenty of the well-known about it. With perfect pitch, the play ridicules typical Hollywood versions of the Old Country, and any audience has already seen everything in The Quiet Valley, the movie being shot, a hundred times: it is a tale of forbidden love between a daughter of the "big house" and a handsome peasant, an epic complete with a dance scene, a turf-digging scene, and an eviction scene. A soundtrack of canned fiddle tunes completes the déjà vu. Charlie and Jake, of course, can point out every speck of phoniness in "Americans playing Irish. "Stones in His Pockets, however, wants to mock clichés while indulging in some of its own. Kieran Creggan's portrayal of Catherine Giovanni, the spoiled American actress, is a delight–the walk, the hair-flip, the artfully-planned breathless pauses–but the character parodies a caricature: Catherine is false and full of herself, in love with the idea of integrity while she revels in the perks of selling out; she is everything that is already easy to believe about Hollywood and America. It does not require much satiric courage, or dramatic muscle, to make her an insensitive phony who dashes a young man's dreams. Or to make the Hollywood production company a commercial bully that raises the villagers' hopes and pretends to admire genuine Irish culture only to exploit the location and its people unfeelingly. A similar simplicity of target in David Mamet's State and Main (which also showed what happens when a movie production company moves into a small town) seemed similarly cheap. 
    Of the film-business figures we see, the only fleshed-out character is Simon, a self-hating Irish-American trying to negotiate between his director and the crowds of extras. But by the end of Stones, the script takes little interest in his complexity, and he becomes fodder for the emotional victory of an old Irishman, Mickey–"the last surviving extra from The Quiet Man"–who resigns from the set. As we learn in Mickey's final speech, The Quiet Valley is being shot on property that once belonged to Mickey's family, and we are meant to cheer the proud put-downs of his triumphant exit. It is a little too pat, relying on knee-jerk responses to any sentence about land spoken with an Irish accent. Irish characters in Stones sometimes seem as quickly drawn as the Hollywood figures. This does not detract from the play's many laughs.
     But Stones wants to make darker emotion from the tragedy of a young Irishman named Sean, who never becomes distinct enough to earn the desired sympathy. Sean is a collage of problems and yearnings: He loves make-believe and wants to travel to America. He also wants to become a cattle farmer like his father and was crushed when the family land had to be sold. He is naïve about the ways of the world, and he is addicted to drugs. "Imagination can be a damned curse in this country," says Sean's former teacher (a brother whose character lets in the requisite jokes about Irish Catholicism's strictures.) Sean is an outline of the dreaming Irishman, slightly updated.
    Of course, clichés are clichés for a reason; themes of imagination, provinciality, love of losing, and land all still resonate, and all can still provide comedy or compelling drama. It is through Charlie and Jake, the main characters of the play, that Stones might find how the Irish can counter outsiders' stereotypes without falling back onto aimless hopes or complacent failure. Their solution does and does not satisfy. Charlie and Jake plan to make their own movie based on their experiences as movie "nobodies." When Jake tells his friend that they can turns things around and makes extras into leads, the two think it a revolutionary reversal. It is not, of course. And this Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interested in testing the problems of their chosen medium. (Jake and Charlie's movie will be called Stones in His Pockets, too, but the play does not suggest any self-commentary here; the script under discussion is different from the script we have been watching.) These extras know that their movie will be different, because it will show the "real" story of "real" Irish. It all depends on the difference between "real" life and "real real life," as an early speech of Charlie confusingly distinguishes. Jake and Charlie assume that close-ups of cowpats are enough to counter Hollywood hypocrisy. Maybe. But take a look at the cow merchandise hawked in the Stones program: one can imagine Jake and Charlie's film flattering expectations of international audiences just as well as The Quiet Valley. "I love the movies," says Charlie. "They're unreal." Trusting that such unreality is the best space for the truth of the extras' experience seems to promise further self-deception and failure. At the end of Stones, however, Jake and Charlie are sure that the screen will save them.
    The audience is meant to believe in this ending, too. But the play proves what really deserves faith, and that has nothing to do with movies and everything to do with theatre. The joy of Stones is in watching Creggan and Lagan create fully populated scenes all by themselves. Their onstage support consists of little more than a chest, a couple of chairs, a box, and a few vests and jackets, and from these simple props two actors make a whole village. When Creggan becomes a self-important security guard, his stiff-legged, puffed-torso walk is enough to start the audience laughing. (And then he speaks....) When Lagan assumes the role of an old man, the musculature of his neck seems literally to age. We know Clem, the half-dotty English director casting a lecherous eye at young assistants, from the instant Creggan hitches up his trousers and sinks his head into his collarbone. Dozens of physical details are carefully, perfectly imagined, some showy (the dancing sequence is a marvel), some simpler: a man mimes his movement into a pew at a funeral, greeting those he knows with half-hushed nods, and all of sudden, the audience can see a full row of tight-lipped churchgoers. Only after the show can one fully appreciate the ease and facility of each transition, and the perfect timing of every reaction from one character or the other. Such theatricality makes obvious pretense into a real delight.
AC Grayling