“DAUGHTER KNOWS BEST FOR HER GRUMPY DAD: The Noble Call (Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin ✩✩✩✩) is a neat little two-hander by Michael Harnett that's perfectly suited to a lunchtime audience. Its themes are universal: family relationships, old grievances, and a few revelations, mostly sorted out within the hour. Da (Vinnie McCabe) suffering from a terminal lung problem, probably caused by smoking, is visited in his retirement home by his divorced daughter Mona (Noni Stapleton). She's a well-meaning young woman with her own problems willing to humour the crotchety Da. He's your regulation grumpy old man who finds almost everything and everyone annoying. Despite his knee-jerk opposition to everything, he slowly thaws and becomes more agreeable.
An old photo album from his home is the prop that sets up a new set of circumstances and revelations. It also becomes the means by which we see a totally different side to Da and which allows Mona to show her magnanimous heart. Much of the revelatory information is fairly predictable but it has little twists that keep you interested, and there's a good leavening of humour. The script is not always subtle, and it has an element of sentimentality but it's never pretentious or cloying and the performances are first rate.”
-Mail on Sunday
THE NOBLE CALL
“Michael Harnett's play, The Noble call, is proof once again of how good theatre needs no gimmickry or self- regarding 'cleverality' or imposed innovation, just a commitment to telling the story which is exactly what Harnett and his team do so well in this two-hander, directed by Elyn Friedrichs at Bewleys Theatre Café. In fact, the threads of several stories are woven together skilfully into the main narrative. Unseen characters - and even some dead ones - are evoked deftly through incidental references, so that they flesh out and explain the lives and emotions of the two characters on stage, Da and Mona.
Harnett's fine ear for natural dialogue is done full justice by Vinnie McCabe and Noni Stapleton, ailing Da and supportive but exasperated Mona, as they take us through a beautifully paced exploration of child-parent relationships, with their share of mistakes and misunderstandings, dealing with the onset of serious illness and arrangements for what will inevitably follow. However, the seriousness of the issues is treated with humour, warmth and humanity, so that misunderstanding and resentment eventually gives way to insight and empathy. Shuffling, wheezy Da, still enjoying the pleasures that caused his illness, is given to moments of coarseness and frustration, as well as tenderness and vulnerability. McCabe has the measure of every emotion. Stapleton's Mona is no less convincing, a dutiful daughter, doing more than her share in the family, dealing eventually with an unexpected revelation. The only reservation about the play is this twist, more specifically the improbability of how and where it is revealed. However, this seems a mere quibble; this lunchtime play is a particularly rewarding, hour-long piece of theatre, with acting and direction of the highest order.”
-Paddy McGovern, No More Workhorse