Dramatists from JM Synge to Martin McDonagh have long sought to dismantle myths about the idyllic charm of small-town Irish life. But Mark O’Rowe, in a play first seen in 2003 and now revived by Druid for the Galway festival, goes further than most in suggesting that off-the-tourist-map communities seethe with domestic abuse, cruelty to animals and murderous revenge. Even if the picture seems wildly overdrawn, it is sustained by the verbal vivacity that has been O’Rowe’s trademark signature ever since his early work Howie the Rookie in 1999.
The story emerges through rhyming monologues delivered by three women who seem to epitomise the unnamed town’s spiritual and physical chaos. Olive is a rampantly promiscuous married woman who taunts her wimpish husband and suffers tragic consequences. Alison lives in a state of vengeful silence with her own faithless husband, reinforced by her son’s non-communicativeness after a brain-damaging accident. Meanwhile Tilly, a junkie sex-worker, suffers gruesomely at the hands of her clients and her pimp, and makes the phonecall that triggers the blood-drenched denouement.
I found myself longing for some analysis of what provokes such widespread violence. Does it lie in a nation’s past, in present political failures or in a toxic global culture? It may be significant that even a hotel desk clerk sports a shotgun which he dubs “the enforcer”, as if he were in a Clint Eastwood movie. But, even if O’Rowe’s 70-minute play is short on explanations, it survives through the colour of its language and its nightmarish vision of a community where even the children have inherited corrupt adult values and the streets are menaced by a three-eyed dog.
Annabelle Comyn’s production, by placing the three women in what looks like a corrugated industrial container and having them wear similar institutional costume, suggests they are all entrapped and defined by circumstance. The actors are also extremely powerful.
Kate Stanley Brennan’s Olive is all wild-eyed defiance, Siobhán Cullen as Alison is more grimly determined in her strategic attack on her husband, and Amy McElhatton wistfully conveys Tilly’s punctured romance and her memory of what she sadly calls her “almost maternity”. O’Rowe may deal more in the symptoms of social decline than the causes but the Druid company, very like Chicago’s Steppenwolf, is so strong that no visit to their theatre is ever wasted.
•At Mick Lally theatre, Galway, until 29 July. Box office: 353 91 566577. Then at Abbey theatre, Dublin, 1-12 August. Box office: 353 1 8787222.
