Pat Kinevane's new play is lively, mildly comic and, ultimately, unforgivingly dark. Rhea Normile has come home from exile to pay homage to her old friend Lil at her overgrown grave outside the village of Tinaglasha in Co Cork. At first the narrative chat to the gravestone is jocularly sociable, as if in renewing a friendship after a long parting, but as the memories build, her talk is tinged with suggestions of dark happenings during a summer in the 1970s when there was, maybe, a murder and worse. Meanwhile, simultaneously on the stage but dramatically back during that earlier summer, her son Picus and his friend Silvy, along with flirty, pretty Bellona Kelly and her less pretty and less flirty friend Jaso McLoughlin are fooling around in the beech wood, behaving very much as young people do in their late adolescent summer holidays.
The dialogue is staccato, rapid, sharp and nuanced. The action is both athletic and lethargic, and it is persuasively authentic as, for most of the play, nothing much happens of any significance. There is much girl-talk and boy-talk and girl-boy talk and only occasional mention of the strange nun (a novice, maybe) without a veil who wanders among the beech trees and turns out to be called Circe. In theatrical terms, the piece is a mite too enigmatic and the parallel actions of Mrs Normile at the grave in 1998 and the young people's summer of 1974 which was to end in violent tragedy do not meet sufficiently to be the ironic or foreboding counterpoint one of the other. But the sheer energy of the writing and of the playing is utterly compelling as, between the two separated threads of the play, the enclosed life of a small village is unerringly etched.
Jim Culleton's direction moves everything along at breakneck speed, with well placed variations where love or lethargy require it. The setting by Kieran McNulty of tall-standing beech trees and scots pine is, apart from a poor back cloth, redolent of a rustic summer. Paul Keogan's lighting is excellent in both mood and illumination. Every actor's characterisation is deft and deep in individual terms and the ensemble playing is seamless, especially among the four young people - Chris Kelly as Picus Mormile, Emily Nagle as Bellona Kelly, Fiona Condon as Jaso McLaughlin and Myles Horgan as Silvy Horgan - with Maire Hastings's Mrs Normile and Caroline Gray's mysterious Circe perfectly balanced as the "outsiders" of their summer lives.
Staged by Fishamble, this is a collective performance to savour and a play which, if not structurally perfect, marks a significant debut for Pat Kinevane.
Runs until May 23rd in Dublin, then tours to Longford, Kilkenny, Cork and Limerick. Booking from: 1850 260027.
