Dramatists, as they get older, often do away with the impedimenta of realism. Tom Murphy here focuses with Beckettian directness on the decline of his eponymous Irish heroine over a quarter of a century. The result is a strange, poetic, poignant study of a life half lived, and of suffering stubbornly endured.
We first meet Murphy's Alice when she is 25 and communing with her alter ego in a dusty attic. On the surface she has much to be grateful for: three young children and a solid, budgie-breeding, banker husband. But her incessant tippling and thoughts of suicide tell us she is deeply disturbed. And when she reveals that "there's a strange, savage, beautiful and mysterious country inside me", she sounds like Ibsen's Nora trapped inside the cage of bourgeois respectability.
But the virtue of Murphy's play is that it implies some malaise in Irish society not confined to women. In the second, most striking episode, Alice, now 40, meets up with a former lover. Like Alice, he is outwardly successful: in fact, a famous TV face. But, mistaking the rendezvous for a signal to escape, he reveals his own seething violence and paranoia. As played by Juliet Stevenson and Stanley Townsend, this scene beautifully brings out both the wan despair of middle-age and some baffled affliction within the Irish temper.
By the third scene, Alice is a 50-year-old woman sitting in an airport restaurant communing with herself while her indecently-rich husband silently eats. If I find this scene the least engrossing, it is because her sadness is now externally motivated: she is estranged from her grown-up children, one of whom has prematurely died. Even so, there is something about her commitment to a habit-shrouded marriage that leaves one moved.
The play's impact depends on Stevenson's mesmerising performance. Although the character's Irish roots are only fitfully suggested, she graphically shows how the incarcerated dreamer of 25 turns into the stoic sufferer of 50. What Stevenson also brings out is the character's inner discontent: talking of the "comfort" offered by a priest in bereavement, she snaps out the word with metallic harshness. When she says "there is no explanation for what cannot be explained", she might be talking of Murphy's play. Although its final meaning is elusive, in Ian Rickson's expertly judged production it admits us to the solitude and despair within the Irish soul.
· Until December 10. Box office: 7565 5000.
