The evening begins with a post-show discussion of the play we’ve apparently been seeing. But, after that piece of meta-theatrical quirkiness, we get an extremely sombre re-creation of the tragic suicide pact by an aunt and her three nieces in a small Irish town in July 2000.
Created by Bush Moukarzel and the Dublin-based Dead Centre, it’s a highly disciplined 75-minute show, but one I found relentlessly bleak in its assumption that such events as the one enacted are beyond rational analysis.
The prefatory discussion focuses on the techniques of lip-reading: something of relevance since CCTV footage of two of the four women in a Dublin shop was later examined by the police to deduce their state of mind. In a poignant phrase, we’re also told that “lip-reading is a way of listening to the true words of the powerless”.
But the show never really pursues that premise, since we mostly see the four women in their last days of silent, death-haunted solitude. When they do speak, words are put into their mouths: almost literally so in the case of one of the nieces who emits a stream-of-consciousness monologue filmed in remorseless close-up in the style of Beckett’s Not I.
The actors, especially Eileen Walsh as the word-spewing niece and David Heap as the lip-reader, do a fine job. Ben Kidd and Bush Moukazel as directors also evoke the hermetic desolation of the women who shredded every personal document as if to deny they had ever lived.
But while the show makes us ponder what could drive people to such acts of desperation, it leaves us no wiser. All it really suggests is that, if lip-reading is not always reliably precise, we have little hope of understanding the consciousness that forms the words.
• Until 14 March. Box office: 020-7922 2922. Venue: Young Vic.
