The Passing

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

After the death of their parents, three grown siblings make a sad discovery: as it goes up for sale, their family home has become just another house. In Paul Mercier’s new drama for the Abbey, that transition is no more tangible or less traumatic than when a soul departs a body. But while the first of Mercier’s two rotating plays for the Abbey is performed with vigour – where characters fret, run upstairs and shout – it too seems to have had its life curiously sapped.

Mercier has given us suburban Dublin houses before – structures that were half-built, sturdy or threatened – and used them to bear witness to family ties, urban sprawl and erosion of communities. Such plays spread their concerns with epic verve and playful performance styles. With

The Passing

, though, Mercier sticks to one place, one day and one family, unities that, in combination with Anthony Lamble’s realistic cutaway two-storey set, seem more staid than classical.

At the centre is Catherine (Catherine Walsh), a frantic and frazzled elder sibling, whom we first meet accidentally setting off an alarm and who continues to behave like an emergency siren in encounters with her neighbour (Andrew Connolly), her harried brother Liam (Peter Hanly), her sister Fiona (Kathy Rose O’Brien) and her husband Patrick (Andrew Bennett).

Catherine, whose billowing conspiracy of fabrics signal her flightiness, has suddenly decided against selling. A deadlock between exasperation and hysteria ensues, that neither Walsh, forever flapping her arms, nor Mercier seems to believe in.

Could it be that Mercier, like Catherine, has returned to the subject of home only to realise there is little more to find? As director, he has characters scudding through high-pitched confrontations (“You never loved me!”), yelling from across rooms and, at one point, through a closed door. Pointedly childish behaviour for middle-aged orphans, perhaps, but the stage seems agitated, as though Mercier is trying to claim territory the same way his characters are forever repositioning the living-room vase.

“You can forget about the asking price,” says Liam, for contemporary resonance, but the present barely registers as anything more than an aftershock of the past.

“We’re nothing more than fucking ghosts here,” he says, unsure whether to move on or stay put, and though Connolly, O’Brien, Bennett and – in supporting roles – Nick Lee and Roxanna Nic Liam do well to let character details accumulate, Mercier leaves further history misty, as though the house itself should fill in the blanks.

If these walls could talk, then, they ought to butt in. Instead, its temporary inhabitants seem both rootless and purposeless, ghosts awaiting their exorcism, spirits just passing through.

Until April 16th