The two plays collected here are very different but they also have similarities - both deal with pairs of women, both have only 2 characters and both explore what it means to be a woman (albeit at different times and ways).

Whistling Psyche (first produced at the Almeida Theatre, London on 12 May 2004, directed by Robert Delamere) reintroduces us to two characters which most people may have heard of: Dr. James Barry (a Victorian military surgeon) and Florence Nightingale. The two of them met in real life during the Crimean War - one of them towards the end of a career, the other one just starting one (and they disliked each other). And here they are now, in some type of a waiting room, some time after they had died. One of them can see and hear the other, the other cannot. What follows are essentially two monologues (one of them with reactions to things being said) in which both women tell their stories.

If you do not know the story of Dr. James Barry, the play may be a bit confusing until things click. She was born a woman after all and despite living all her life after teenage-hood as a man, she was still a woman (in Barry's imagination, she even gave birth to a child; in real life that event is unconfirmed but hinted at).

Women in medicine in this era are rare - both women changed what women can do in the venue. Some of the story of Dr. Barry is her regret at never getting the same reputation as Miss Nightingale did - after all, she was first and she was a doctor.

It is a nice play although I wish that Barry had gone for a direct dialog - but then it would have been hard for both of them to tell their stories for us. As for the title - it is the name of a pet (or a series of them) but it also fits the play.

According to the notes by Barry, James Barry is not a relative but he was given the surgeon's biography The Perfect Gentleman by June Rose (1977) (the subtitle being "The remarkable life of Dr James Miranda Barry, the woman who served as an officer in the British Army from 1813 to 1859") which served a source for that part of the story. The other half of the pair is a lot better known and the titles he mentions are Florence Nightingale by Cecil Woodham-Smith (1950), the chapter on her in Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918) and the much more recent Ireland and the Crimean War by David Murphy. I had not read either.

This is the second play by Barry that deals with real historical figures (and not the normal people of Ireland as most of his work does) - and unlike Hinterland, everyone in this story is dead (in real life and incidentally also in the play) so it is the first play that uses real people with their own names as characters.

Fred and Jane (first produced at the Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin in August 2004, directed by Caroline FitzGerald) is much shorter than the previous play - about 1/3rd in length.

Two nuns sit in the ante-room of a convent and talk: Beatrice Dunne, in her sixties, speaking with Midlands accent and Anna Nagle, in her thirties, speaking with middle-class Dublin accent. They don't talk to each other but talk together to a third person - who is not there - the audience, the mirror, take your pick - an interview without an interviewer.

Once upon a time, when Anna was a novice, she met Beatrice for the first time. At a later stage, they got separated, each sent to different places where they excelled at what they are doing - but something was always off. And now they are reunited.

None of them comes out and say what is obvious clearly - because the play is a love story of course. It is never clear if any of the decisions made for them was because of that or if anyone was aware; it is not even clear if there was a love story indeed. But the play tells both their joined story but also the story of a nun during these years (the setting is contemporary or close enough to it) and shows them as women - liking things that you would not expect nuns to. And somehow in such a short play, Barry also manages to show the Dublin/province split which had always been part of the national story.

As for the title? It is Fred Astaire and Jane Fonda of course. :)

The story does not tie directly with the rest of Barry's work but these family names will be familiar if you had some of his novels and plays. They are not on the list of characters (only first names are added there), they are revealed as the play progresses and when they showed up, I was smiling - we may had actually heard/seen something about both of them somewhere before. Or not - but using the same family names makes them feel a lot closer to us.

I enjoyed the play - there isn't as much depth as in his other work but the play is very short. And it still manages to surprise. ( )