Sisters of the Rising review: A strangely quiet revolution

Sisters of the Rising
Everyman Palace, Cork
★★

The quiet plucking of a harp, so emblematic in itself that it might have arrived straight from Tara's walls, establishes the poignant atmosphere of Christiane O'Mahony's first play. Sisters of the Rising tells a story of two young women allied to the Irish Citizen Army in 1916 who insert themselves into the GPO to help out with the rebellion.

Their anticipation of events – otherwise unexpected by older heads than theirs – is a mystery that O’Mahony does not explain beyond wish fulfilment. Although she provides a backstory that includes a mother happier in the drawing rooms of Fitzwilliam Square, and a father who speaks in loudly republican slogans, there are several significant spaces that the domestic chatter between the sisters cannot fill.

In a one-act play such gaps are not only noticeable but theatrically tiresome, and when the girls knock at the post office door announcing they have come “to fight for our country”, their appointment to kitchen duties seems undeniably appropriate.

Underneath the silliness of this sequence of nonevents, a sober exploration of sibling and parental influence is suggested. As Jo, the elder of the two sisters, O’Mahony looks backward to ponder the fate of the younger Gill (Roseanne Lynch). But this pondering is communicated in rhyming couplets that descend to a doggerel that resists O’Mahony’s careful phrasing.

Brian Mitchell's set of minimal detail, a graceful choreographic commentary provided by Andy Crook and director Anushka Senanayake, and an original score by John O'Brien emphasise the internalisation of an important national event, although the absence of a credit for sound effects indicates O'Mahony's belief that this was the quietest revolution known to mankind.

• Until March 18th