The House
Town Hall Theatre, Galway
★★★★☆
There’s a moment in The House, Tom Murphy’s 1950s-set drama, here receiving a bold revival by Druid, when a local man returned from England visits his friend, a solicitor. Discussing goings-on in the town, Christy gingerly guides the conversation to a property for sale. “What’s its value?” he asks, carefully avoiding eye contact, in Marty Rea’s compellingly sly performance.
After years of strenuous upkeep, Woodlawn, an attractive period house, is being sold by Mrs de Burca, a kind matriarch who once employed Christy’s mother as a maid and, in Marie Mullen’s radiantly warm performance, has taken him in as chosen family. Her daughters think differently of him: the career-focused Marie (Rachel O’Byrne) seems wary of his presence; the married Louise (Jessica Dunne Perkins) is insistent on continuing an affair with him; and Suzanne (Amy Molloy), a snob who also returned from England, makes a curious dismissal of him: “All men are pimps,” she says.
Set during a summer fortnight when locals return from living abroad, Murphy’s vision of 1950s Tuam shows Christy and his friends slam down bar glasses, loathing their inhospitable townspeople, while occasionally breaking out in screwy accents they heard in Hollywood movies. (“Yee-haw, guys!” hoots Goldfish, a sharply dressed returnee from the United States played by Colm Lennon.) One of their company who never emigrated (nicely judged by Cathal Ryan) becomes galled by their rants: “Where do you belong? You belong nowhere.”
That painful rootlessness informs the daring approach of Garry Hynes, the production’s director, and Francis O’Connor, its set designer, which sees an unpredictable Christy invisibly stalk the interiors of Mrs de Burca’s house while an exterior wall slants impossibly overhead, as if reflected in a distortion mirror. Druid has found an invigoratingly fresh interpretation: The House has become a funhouse.
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The logical next step to take with Murphy’s 24-year-old play, it seems, is to venture deeper inside Christy’s obsessed mind. A fleeting reference to a sad childhood, to running away from an abusive father, now unfolds as a complicated psychology, with Christy seen reverting to boylike innocence, watching the de Burcas while hiding behind a banister or crouching happily beside them to look at a family photo album.
A lot of the play’s points are buried, requiring careful excavation by the audience. While the town’s full-time residents get to openly console each other’s trauma (see the extraordinary scene where Mullen’s Mrs de Burca passes one daughter her cigarette, regretting not stepping in against her abusive husband), the returning inhabitants only get to speak in unconfirmed details: what to make of one hothead’s accusation of a sergeant harassing a child, or a construction worker with surprisingly smooth hands, or a glamorous woman who vaguely explains that her dress was a “gift”?
Murphy was drawn to the secret lives of those forced to leave; his breakout play, A Whistle in the Dark, from 1961, is the inversion of The House. Against a wider society of deceit and violence, they’re seen longing for a refuge uncorrupted by the rest of the world. By its gripping conclusion, however, the house is just unkept gardens and crumbling walls.
The House, staged by Druid, continues at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, until Saturday, September 21st, then moves to the Gaiety, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from Thursday, September 26th, until Sunday, October 6th
