All children eavesdrop on their parents’ relationship to some degree, and what is overheard can shape their view of marriage long into adult life. Sometimes it leaves wounds that refuse to heal. When they were growing up, Carmen (Caoilfhionn Dunne) and her younger sister Mandy (Amy McAllister) were always lurking on the other side of the door. As their father, Liam (Paul Loughran), would tell his wife Mary-Louise (Catriona Ni Mhurchu): “We don’t have children, we have spies.”
Now Liam and Mary-Louise have been dead 10 years, and Carmen – a country and western singer – is making one last attempt to free her little sister from beliefs that keep her wedded to religion and the past and incapable of forging a future. The significance of Isobel Waller-Bridge’s clever sound design only gradually reveals itself, and everyone is an unreliable narrator in Michel Tremblay’s French-Canadian portrait of a deeply unhappy marriage. It has been effortlessly transposed to 1970s Dublin by translator Michael West.
Loughran’s Liam is clearly the tight-fisted brute who his wife claims would walk three miles to save twopence, but are the reasons for his behaviour to be found at work and in the bedroom? Is Ni Mhurchu’s apparently more sympathetic Mary-Louise always telling the truth, or just playing to the gallery to gain the sympathy of the little spies outside the door? Were this ill-suited pair ever as happy as the plaster figures of a loving couple perched around the stage in Polly Sullivan’s design?
Laurence Boswell’s production keeps things simple: four performers sit in a row and address the audience directly, while past and present perspectives curl around each other. It’s neatly done, but this intense excavation of a fatally damaged marriage feels like one that has been told many times before. Overly studied, it never quite grabs the heart.
• At Ustinov Studio, Bath, until 30 April. Box office: 01225 823409.
