Tic

Focus Theatre, Dublin

It is 1893, among Ireland’s landed gentry, and high in a tower a young woman is barking. What is the reason behind her strange eruptions, nervous mannerisms and flailing convulsions? Is it, as her husband and a Catholic priest believe, a sign of demonic possession? Are these the symptoms of a barely understood neurological disorder, wonders a young doctor familiar with the work of George Giles de la Tourette? Or, as the audience for Elizabeth Moynihan’s play suspects, is this character in the merciless grip of a dramatic metaphor?

Developed from a one-act version first staged in 2007, Moynihan’s engaging play pursues each diagnosis. Exploring the confinement of a woman in a time before suffrage, hemmed in by politics and expression, the condition makes a convenient symbol – given further echoes by allusions to Rapunzel’s tower.

But Moynihan’s scrupulous research depicts both disorder and social context as something more unsettlingly real and the play occupies an intriguing space between the drift of fable and the facts of medical history.

Joe Devlin’s considered production finds much reward in that friction, paying equal attention to its physical and intellectual possibilities, nowhere more so than in Lorna Quinn’s absorbing performance as the play’s nameless protagonist. Quinn, both stately and otherworldly, periodically contorts and spasms from the core of her body as though her performance were a prolonged dance. “It is interpreter of me,” she says of her affliction, “I barely exist.” She may as well be speaking of Victorian gender politics.

Moynihan elegantly pursues her theme through literature and language, buffeting Quinn with the inaccessible huffing of a servant’s Irish (delivered by Sonya O’Donoghue), or the Latin incantations of an exorcising (and thoroughly villainous) priest (Neil Hogan), while her own profane yapping resembles the articulation of smothered passion. Just as her condition demands new understanding, so her interest in Zola and Maupassant represent a mind and a time that crave new ways of thinking.

The male characters are less well realised, but there’s enough ambiguity in the intentions of Michael Bates’s husband to suggest either a cruel jailer or a man whose compassion is constrained by his time. And if Colm O’Brien’s empathetic young doctor initially seems like a fantasy of escape, Moynihan undercuts his wooing words with a pointed wit: “You will be my case study!” Ultimately more interested in the silken layering of its ideas than a plot, the play leaves its protagonist facing one prison or another, her decision kept in a deliberate haze.

We might hope for a more radically decisive heroine, but Quinn’s character never asks to read Ibsen, and at least it points to the realisation of her own agency.

The malady may never be overcome, Moynihan knows, but society and understanding can be improved: this may be the first step towards finding a cure. Runs until September 18.