Tom Murphy's vision of Ireland is not a pretty sight, but it is drawn with a disturbing honesty and coloured with a uniquely personal mix of anger and compassion, the latter usually for the marginalised outsider and the former generally for those people and structures that cause the isolation. The villains in this latest play are respectability and emotional avoidance, the heroes a trio of unlikely characters who try (however unsuccessfully) to break the social and psychological mould.
It opens tentatively: a car stops, its headlights glaring in darkness. Vera gets out and walks uncertainly forwards. Her former neighbour, Mrs Conneeley, walks even less certainly towards her and, once recognition is established, they talk of the death, some time ago, of Vera's grandmother with whom she was fostered while a child. Maybe she need not have died if help or caring had been brought to her sooner after she fell into the fire.
Vera has returned from America to visit her family past and, maybe, to oversee the sale of the hotel, the old family home, which her mother left to her. She seeks out an old flame, despised tinker Finbar, with whom she had a short fling once upon a time. It will be a while before she makes contact with the family who do not come to her but send the garda, a doctor and a priest before them, she and Finbar and an unlikely soulmate, Henry Lock Browne, of Protestant extraction, having holed up for drunken days in the closed hotel which Vera might sell or lease - or burn to the ground.
The dialogue is rich and laden with metaphysical, social and psychological resonance. It is also, at times, very funny indeed. It would yield more, theatrically speaking, if there were somewhat less of it, particularly in the first act, which is dramatically too long to be wholly rewarding. The resolution of the drama (if it can be described as resolving anything at all) is also unnecessarily extended beyond its theatrical worth, but it is preceded by scenes of thrillingly good theatre, beautifully written and superbly performed.
Under Patrick Mason's tightly disciplined direction, there is not a performance that is without great depth and illumination of the human condition. Jane Brennan's Vera, suffused with self-loathing and vengeful anger, is crafted with huge courage and determination. David Herlihy's despised Finbar maintains an almost constant state of surprise and defeat. Stanley Townsend's Henry is the embodiment of an elegy for opportunities lost to respect ability.
The extended family, held together more by commercial than emotional ties, might have come across as caricatures had it not been for the depth of the portrayals by Olwen Fouere, Phelim Drew, Anna Healy, Jennifer O'Dea and Simon Jewell, while Sean Rocks provides a hilariously ineffective priest and Pat Leavy's Mrs Conneeley makes a suitably earthy prologue and epilogue.
Francis O'Connor's evocative settings are appropriately gloomy for the most part (but, despite being minimalist in many instances, take a mite too long to change between the multiple scenes), but Ben Ormerod's atmospheric lighting could have done with more focus and more candle-power. Overall, however, this is a mighty, if flawed, evening of imaginative Irish theatre which demands to be seen.
Continues until march 7th. Booking on 01-8787222
