Forcibly rehousing badgers is a very bad idea. Frank, a feckless Irish farmer, discovers this to his cost when he attempts to transplant a pair to a new set. Understandably furious, the bleary creatures make a bolt for their old hole.
The tragedy is that Frank badgers his wife in much the same way. Molly is a middle-aged woman who has her sight partially restored in a play that is only partially written. Molly Sweeney's resources are so meagre as to barely exist - three actors on three chairs intoning three monologues. Few contemporary playwrights could make a memorable event from a play about blindness and with nothing to watch. Brian Friel is the honourable exception.
For this theatrical poem from 1994, Friel revisited the monologue format of his earlier play, Faith Healer. Both pieces are embedded in stillness, requiring the audience to listen for the action in the language. But it is appropriate that Molly Sweeney should be a play for the ear as much as the eye, as it tells the story of a woman exiled from her world of darkness to a confusing region of half-shadow.
Stella Madden gives a brilliantly alert portrayal of a woman keenly alive to her own sensory sphere, whose edge is blunted by the influx of light. Madden persuades you that Molly does not have her sight restored so much as her blindness confiscated. Karl O'Neill is equally fine as the hapless Frank, whose butterfly enthusiasms suggest that his wife's eyesight is merely one among a number of unfinished projects involving Ethiopian bees and Iranian goats. And Ian Lindsay gives a grave and tender performance as the ageing eye specialist Rice, whose promising career has somehow faded into white hair and whisky but might be resuscitated by his miracle-cure of Molly.
Director Roger Haines hits the right note of understatement for this delicate work. The production is enhanced by the swirling, retinal tracery of Judith Croft's projected designs, which trickle like the capillary patterns of the mind's eye.
Until May 19. Box office: 0161-236 7110.
