Penis size, or rather the anxiety that assails many men about their endowment, is something that is rarely discussed openly. Following the money, however, it doesn’t take a genius to deduce that all those SPAM emails in my inbox, for “Penis Growth Patches” or “Advanced Gain Pro” and the like, are sent out in their millions every day because they must tap into enough men’s neuroses to make them commercially worthwhile. In spite of the clichéd platitude that it doesn’t matter how big it is, it’s what you do with it that counts, for many men that just doesn’t wash. It maybe true that women tend to rate men’s personality and character over their physical attributes, but, in this increasingly body-conscious world, if a man believes himself to not make the grade, the worry can be intensified to a degree that borders on obsession. But men rarely discuss such concerns. Unlike women, who talk freely (and, sometimes, incessantly) to each other about their weight and shape, most men find the subject of their bodies, and especially their cocks, taboo to discuss, even though they are checking each other’s packets out all the time, as Mark Simpson has noted.
Gay men have, of course, in our endearingly tacky way, fetishized the large cock and turned it into a cult. (Indeed, I’ve knelt at that altar many a time). So, as playwright Martin Casella has done in his play The Irish Curse, place a cocksucking man in a group of heterosexual men, all of whom are there seeking to support each other in dealing with their small dicks, and the dramatic potential is quite considerable. Introduce a dynamic youthful newcomer, blunt and insightful, and watch as the group’s “listen to everyone in respectful silence” etiquette is shattered. What seems to have been a gently slumbering, slightly bitchy group of men is woken up by this fresh-faced lad’s punchy challenges, and his capacity to spot the bullshit and defences of the other men, especially the gay one, is quickly acknowledged and appreciated. We learn each man’s story along the way, and finally we get to hear the newcomer tell of what led up to him finding the group.
Add to the mix that they are meeting in a church, and the group is facilitated by a priest, and that only one man out of five of them has a loving sexual relationship, and questions are raised about how being so poorly endowed has affected their adolescence, self-esteem, relationships, and even career choice. Did the cop choose his job because he could “pack” a gun, a replacement phallic symbol? Did the priest flee from fear of sexual humiliation into holy orders? Had one man’s marriage failed due to his own inhibitions, or, as he believed, because his wife fell for a man with a huge dick, taunting him with traced drawings of it? How searing is the damage done, when one is cursed with a small member, or when one identifies with it?
This play won the New York Fringe Festival Playwriting Award in 2005, and reached Edinburgh last year. As described above, this play works engagingly enough as a study in masculinity and vulnerability. Andrew Macklin, who plays the newcomer Ciarán, ripples through the rest of the cast with a scintillating energy, and I found his passion affecting and believable. I was not quite as convinced by the rest of the performances, because it was difficult for me to feel their pain, to empathise with their plight.
This was due in the main to the surreal experience of never having heard of “The Irish Curse” before, at least in the specific way it was meant in this play. Because, from the moment we entered the theatre, listening to traditional Irish music, watching these men come onstage and proclaim in American accents that they are Irish, the message was driven home to us that Irish men, apparently, are renowned for having small dicks.
Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Really? Yes, indeed, and the point was repeated, again and again, until I began to wonder was this one of those theatrical mindfucks where I am being persuaded that black was white. One character, offering a popular cultural reference almost as if he’s justifying the playwright’s choice to portray the issue as a particularly Irish one, tells us that Ben Affleck’s character Chuckie, in the film Good Will Hunting, is accused of having the Irish Curse. In conversation with my Irish-American friend, with whom I saw the show, I learned that he had never heard the phrase, nor had it occurred to him that Irish men were particularly blessed or cursed either way. Asking another group of people later on, they too had not heard of it, and, similarly, had not linked being Irish with being poorly hung. I don’t believe we, as a race, in Ireland, have a complex about penis size – and I believe given my antennae on matters sexual I think I’d have noticed. Not to mention my, erm, own extensive cross-cultural research in the field.
This creates a problem, when a play like this “comes home” to Ireland. While welcoming a play that tackles a potentially embarrassing taboo subject such as this, and one which successfully tells a simple but moving set of stories in just one act, my objection to the central conceit proved, overnight, to be a grower, not a shower, one which, alas, grew too big to overcome.
Venue: PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
Dates:- MON. 14th – SAT. 19th MAY
Time: 8pm
Tickets: €18 (Conc. €16)
Sat Matinee @ 3pm €14