Crystal and Fox revolves around a rundown travelling show and boasts a cast of entertainers as finely drawn as any Brian Friel has devised. But the proprietor, Fox Melarkey, whose ruthless, restless, twisted nature anticipates Frank Hardy in Faith Healer, is ‘weary of all this making do, of conning people that know they’re being conned’, and this entrancing play delineates his course to make the dream he thinks he had come true.
Once, maybe twice in your life, the fog lifts, and you get a glimpse, an intuition; and suddenly you know that this can’t be all there is to it — there has to be something better than this . . . And afterwards all you’re left with is a vague memory of what you thought you saw, and that’s what you hold on to — the good thing you think you saw.
