Young company Sneaky Productions ably step up to the big leagues with this excellently calibrated, haunting one-woman show in the Belfast festival, directed by Owen McCafferty. Every aspect of the production underlines the central theme of Declan Feenan's script: uncertainty.
An angelic-looking young woman walks across a shallow pond lined with autumn leaves. The image is beautiful, thanks to well-harmonised work by designers David Craig and David McDonald, but it's also unsettling: the character's first words are about being afraid of water, so what's she doing up to her ankles in it? The ambiguities and intrigues mount: Claire is a 17-year-old living on her own and working in a meat-processing plant. On a night out, she meets a 45-year-old man in a club who eventually takes her to bed. She is clearly the victim of manipulation - the man knows her age and her vulnerability - but she is not forced; both Feenan's controlled writing and Bronagh Taggart's open-faced performance destabilise our ability to cast judgment.
Claire narrates what's happening to her, not what she's thinking or feeling, and McCafferty helps Taggart hit a perfect tone which could be bewilderment, innocence, or denial. And just when we think we've ended up in a more conventional drama about teenage motherhood, Feenan throws in a corker of a plot twist which has the audience gasping. The production only loses its nerve in an over-narrated sequence leading up to the child's birth, which undermines the menace and ambiguity of the final moment, in which the water image is justified but not adequately explained.
The show makes some very salient points about the root of societal problems in difficult and confusing personal realities, but never allows its ethics to overwhelm its aesthetics, and Sneaky rarely puts a theatrical foot wrong.
