KIN

Liberty Hall, Dublin

“I am on the cusp of something inevitable, unavoidable,” Donna Rutherford tells us. “No one has died.” She does not add the word “yet” but in those stark terms, sensitively delivered and reflected onstage in the sands of an hour glass or a day measured out in mealtimes, she moves towards a consideration of her parents’ mortality. The title is KIN, but the focus is next of.

Sparing, unadorned and placing emphasis on video interviews with some of Rutherford’s artistic peers – a who’s who of contemporary British theatre, including Claire Marshall and Cathy Naden of Forced Entertainment, Richard Gregory of Quarantine, Tim Ingram of Reckless Sleepers and the actor Alison Peebles – the performance asks its middle-aged participants to reflect on their changing relationships with elderly parents.

Although we never hear the precise questions, their responses lean hard on the unvarnished truths behind such euphemisms as “second childhood” (a cliché they quickly dismantle). For all that admirable candour, though, the production risks sliding into morbidity, losing an appreciation of life in the expectation of its alternative.

Honest, unflinching and thoughtful, the participants consider the debt of care they owe to their parents, the distancing effect brought by education or illness and how they recognise the advancing of their own years.

It’s the occasional digression or accidental flash of colour, though, that can disarm and expand a documentary’s agenda. Alive to such detail, Rutherford includes Peebles’s fond, frustrated recognition that she shares her mother’s taste in a particular kind of mug, Marshall’s unconscious verbal tics inherited from her father (“Hell’s bells! Christ alight!”), or the emotional ache that seems to catch Gregory unaware when he recalls his 48th birthday, his first without his mother.

At such moments parents are defined by their sad absence, but, in the case of the living, they can appear voiceless. Rutherford shares glimpses of them at home, but never solicits their thoughts. It’s a deliberate manoeuvre (both parents and children feature in an earlier audio version of KIN), focusing on one generation’s perspective, but its curious effect is to present those parents as preoccupations rather than people. That may be why, even among an older audience during the Bealtaine Festival, most people will instinctively identify with the journey of the children – Rutherford’s protagonists. It’s easier to empathise with losing somebody, than to consider the effect of being lost.

Run concluded