“Any separate status for Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK is seen as potentially damaging to the union as a whole.” So says the BBC’s Brexit explication. Yet “separate status” already exists. Two examples: Northern Ireland uses a different voting system to the rest of the UK in European elections; and in all other countries of the union, abortion is legal, but not in Northern Ireland, except when the woman’s health is at risk. It is the second of these anomalies that forms the subject of this National Theatre of Wales production, written by Welsh playwright Rachel Trezise.
Presented in the form of a monologue, issues become embodied in the person of 19-year-old Aoife, Belfast born and bred, working in a multiplex, living with her depressive mother, helping out her struggling, single-parent sister. Aoife realises she is pregnant (she blames herself for not using a condom; he says he “couldn’t pull out in time”), and the story begins with her taking her first flight – across to Wales for a legal abortion.
She daren’t tell anyone where she has gone or why, least of all her mother. As Aoife shuttles to and fro through events before and beyond this moment – now narrating directly to us, now reliving instants – she weaves us into the complexities of the circumstances that inform her choices.
The set is seemingly simple: a brick-wall backdrop; a dark, reflective floor surface; four plastic chairs in a row, fixed to a metal bench. Aoife drags, pushes, pulls and overturns this bench, physicalising emotions, changing the shape of the space – and of the pictures evoked in our minds of the places she inhabits. The feet of the moving bench trace marks on a fine powder covering the floor. Carl Davies’s design suggests a stark, enclosed world, reflecting its upside-down self to itself through the tracks of the past.
Amy Molloy’s vibrant, finely tuned, multilayered performance and Julia Thomas’s clear direction bring out the strengths of Trezise’s script, which, while compellingly telling this particular story, also expresses a universal experience – of the destructive tensions between what is and what must be seen to be.
● At the Sherman theatre, Cardiff, 5-8 June; Summerhall, Edinburgh, 31 July-25 August
