'DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS A MAN MUST GO...' by Steve Balshaw

DIANE'S DELI by JOE O'BYRNE:  A REVIEW    

Image by DARREN McGINN

A man builds a monument to lost love, only to find he has designed a prison for himself. And possibly a mausoleum. The monument in question is the eponymous DIANE’S DELI, a retro-styled cafe, named for the mysterious Diane, but owned and run by Sean Ginty, an avuncular Irishman with a shadowy and troubled past. Here Sean serves customers, cracks jokes, evades questions, and plays father figure to the burn-scarred young artist Gabrielle and young chancer and would-be writer Jake, encouraging both their creative dreams, and the burgeoning romance between them. Then one evening the plain-clothes detective, Mackey, shows up, hungry for more than just the all-day breakfast special. He has a gnawing curiosity that all the gourmet sausages in the world cannot quieten. And he seems to know a lot more about Sean than he really ought to…    

David Edward Robertson (Det Sgt Mackey) Joe O'Byrne (Sean Ginty)

O’Byrne has been called Salford’s Scorcese, but if anything he has more in common with Martin McDonagh – both writers share a skill for combining dark wit and ugly violence with a certain… not post-modernism, exactly, but... knowingness. 

With its sharp, salty dialogue, wistful wisecracks, and desperate, bruised romanticism, Joe O'Byrne's work has always had a strong Noir element. So it is no great surprise that DIANE'S DELI, the latest instalment in the  acclaimed Paradise Heights cycle should see O’Byrne wearing his love of Film Noir so boldly on his sleeve; very consciously taking hold of key Noir themes and archetypes, clothing them in flesh, blood and bone, and transposing them to a certain Salford housing estate. It’s a tale of damaged, drunken, guilty men, fleeing from past crimes, predatory femmes fatales, and violent retribution. O’Byrne has been called Salford’s Scorcese, but if anything he has more in common with Martin McDonagh – both writers share a skill for combining dark wit and ugly violence with a certain… not post-modernism, exactly, but... knowingness. Thus, DIANE’S DELI begins with a lengthy conversation between Sean and Jake about the art of writing, which is both a mischievous critique of the current vogue for dark romance and urban fantasy, filled with angst-y vampires and tortured were-beasts, and a reminder that the world of Paradise Heights, too, has its supernatural elements; its ghosts and guardian angels. But unlike the UNDERWORLD-inspired underworld Jake is trying to develop, with its thinly-disguised, but heavily-fantasised portraits of those around him, the evil in Paradise Heights remains all-too-human. And for all its seemingly offhand postmodernism, the scene is steeped in foreboding. In advising Jake to write what he knows, to work with the material around him, to strip away the fantastic elements, Sean is, whether he realises it or not, placing himself under the young writer’s microscope. Thus, like all Noir protagonists, he himself sets into motion the mechanism that will bring about his downfall. 

Jo Malone (Gabrielle) Richard Allen (Jake)

But perhaps this is what he has always craved, however subconsciously. Why else would a man on the run, a man trying to hide from himself and others, open up a café, place himself in the public eye on a daily basis? For Diane’s Deli is like Rick’s in CASABLANCA: Everybody comes there, sooner or later. So it is that Mackey the cop arrives; drunk, suspicious, corrupt, filled with self-loathing. The two men recognise each other at once, both as kindred spirits and as mortal enemies, and so begins a verbal sparring, a battle of wits, as Mackey circles ever closer to a truth he already knows about Sean’s past; how it connects to the current situation in Paradise Heights, and to the estate’s demon king, the gangster and club owner Frank Morgan. The stage is set for a showdown. But there is one further complication, and this being Noir, that complication is a woman...

Emma Laidlaw (Cassandra)

...the mercurial, malicious femme fatale, fresh over from Belfast, and intimately familiar with Sean's dark history, is named Cassandra, after the Cassandra of Greek mythology, who foresaw the fall of Troy; a name meaning “deceiver and entangler of men”.  Nobody with that name is ever going to embody anything good. 

That most quintessentially noir of authors, James M. Cain reputedly claimed that THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE was inspired by the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripedes, and his work certainly does have that same stark, fatalism. DIANE'S DELI takes this connection between Noir and Greek Tragedy and runs with it. Thus it is that the mercurial, malicious femme fatale, fresh over from Belfast, and intimately familiar with Sean's dark history, is named Cassandra, after the Cassandra of Greek mythology, who foresaw the fall of Troy; a name meaning “deceiver and entangler of men”.  Nobody with that name is ever going to embody anything good. Not in Greek Tragedy; not in Film Noir. And not in Paradise Heights. Vengeful and unstable, this Irish Cassandra brings with her desperation, desire, and destruction. She is the dark angel of Sean’s past, and possibly the bright angel of Mackey’s future - if he can only save her from herself and the violence that dogs her trail. But that violence is drawing ever closer, in the person of her estranged husband, the nemesis Sean has evaded for so long, the psychopathic Milo...

Neil Bell - rear of pic (Milo)

But this is a very, very contained and controlled piece, all of it taking place within the increasingly claustrophobic confines of the eponymous Deli, as the Noir themes gradually unfold, then peel back to reveal a tragic final irony worthy of the ancient Greeks. 

Beginning with a series of deceptively relaxed conversations about the creative process between Sean and his substitute family, Jake and Gabrielle, the drama is played out as a series of ever more tense confrontations – Sean and Mackey, Cassandra and Gabrielle, Cassandra and Sean, Sean and Milo. There are in-jokes - from sly verbal references to THE GODFATHER and SEXY BEAST among others, to the choice of name for the corrupt cop, surely a nod to the Michael Chiklis character Vic Mackey, in THE SHIELD. There are tantalising hints of things to come in later stories in the Paradise Heights cycle – mention of an increasingly paranoid and isolated Frank Morgan, hardly ever leaving his club, The Ace of Spades, and of Milo's brother Tommy back in Belfast, a man who “learned everything he knows from Frank”, and of whom we have surely not heard the last. But this is a very, very contained and controlled piece, all of it taking place within the increasingly claustrophobic confines of the eponymous Deli, as the Noir themes gradually unfold, then peel back to reveal a tragic final irony worthy of the ancient Greeks. Directed with a light touch by Neil Bell, who allows the dialogue and the performances to dictate the pace; the initial leisureliness yielding to an ever tightening vice of unreleased tension, as the actors make the words and characters their own. O'Byrne himself takes the lead, as the conflicted and cornered Sean, a sympathetic figure for all of his past actions, with equally strong turns from David Edward-Robertson as the sleazy and yet oddly vulnerable Mackey, Emma Laidlaw as the volatile Cassandra, Jo Malone as the tragic, yet plucky Gabrielle, Richard Allen as the affable chancer, Jake, and the play's director, Neil Bell, utterly terrifying as Milo. Oh, and there's an electrifying last minute appearance by Julie Donnelly, about which I can say very little for fear of spoilers. The majority of these actors are no strangers to Paradise Heights. O'Byrne has, over time, built up a collective of regular collaborators on the project, whose familiarity with the landscape and language of his carefully-created fictional world, and with one another as performers, only adds to the sense of its concrete reality and their shared history within it. 

Julie Donnelly

DIANE'S DELI, then, is a welcome addition to the Paradise Heights cycle; tough and tender, bleak and witty, seductively romantic and explosively violent, by turns. A tale of love and loss, revenge and redemption; all of Film Noir's sorrow, cynicism and sourness casting sombre shadows on the rainswept streets of Salford, it is, as Sam Spade would say, the stuff that dreams are made of. Or maybe nightmares. Either way, once again, Joe O'Byrne delivers a series of (Mike) Hammer blows to the audience and leaves them reeling. He's one of contemporary drama's great world builders, with each self-contained narrative offering further insights into the world of Paradise Heights. It's a world you can get lost in. If you are willing to take the risk of running into Frank Morgan, one dark and stormy night... 

STEVE BALSHAW
Steve Balshaw is a film programmer, curator and events manager. He is currently film programmer for GrimmFest and co-ordinator of the thrice-yearly Filmonik Kabaret, and former programme manager of Salford Film Festival, and the Manchester KINO Film Festival.