Bedbound: Colm and Brenda Meaney shine as Father and Daughter in Enda Walsh’s most Beckettian play

Bedbound

Bailey Allen Hall, University of Galway

★★★☆☆

Bedbound is perhaps Enda Walsh’s most Beckettian play. Like Mouth in Not I, the characters are defined entirely by what they say rather than by what they do. For the 75 minutes of the drama they are largely confined to a double bed rather than to a dusty pile of rubble (Happy Days) or a dustbin (Endgame). One of the characters, Daughter, is immobile. The other has built the room in which they are imprisoned. If Max Darcy – “the Michael of Collins of furniture” – weren’t her father you might call him Bluebeard. Indeed, the fairy-tale tyrant offers a good way into Walsh’s verbally dense text, where words are both the enemy of truth and the vital lifeblood for the characters’ existence. Mercifully, incest is not one of Father’s sins.

Father (Colm Meaney) and Daughter (Brenda Meaney) have been trapped in Daughter’s plywood-and-plasterboard room for a decade. He is a messianic, megalomaniac salesman brought down by his own ambition: her life was the sacrifice he made that didn’t pay off. Daughter enacts a series of storytelling rituals with him to pass the time, hoping to move, in her imagination at least, beyond her reality to the happy ever after of the fairy-tale romances her mother read aloud to her before she died.

[ ‘We’ve got to get these f**kers out – Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’: Colm Meaney on acting and activism ]

Jamie Vartan’s set for this production, directed by Marc Atkinson Borrull and staged by Landmark in association with Galway International Arts Festival, eschews obvious dwarfed ideas of claustrophobia, offering a mythical, heightened sense of confinement instead. A labyrinth of high walls surround the room where Father and Daughter lie trapped, suggesting a maze of the mind: they are metaphorically as well as physically stuck. Sinéad McKenna’s chalky lighting design adds shadows to the washed-out colour palette, and Sinéad Diskin’s gently sinister sound design polishes the otherworldly effect.

The real-life father-daughter relationship of the leading actors adds more than just billboardability. As Daughter, Brenda Meaney brings a physical fragility and emotional range to the confined young woman. She nimbly slips between roles in the storytelling sessions she demands from Father, and uses her character’s physical immobility to heighten moments of gestural interaction. As Father, Colm Meaney is piteous in a cheap suit, whether cowering under a blanket or attempting to regale Daughter with stories of his success. There is a fragile intimacy between the Meaneys, especially in the moments when they are physically close.

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As an early play from Walsh – the work premiered in 2000 – Bedbound sets out many of the themes Walsh would return to, but the violence and sexual fetishisation strike a crude and adolescent note almost a quarter of a century later, and the sentimental ending feels unearned, even by the excellent actors.

Bedbound continues as part of Galway International Arts Festival until Saturday, July 29th, then runs at 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, from Tuesday, August 8th, until Saturday, August 12th