Secrets are washed up on the tide in Abbie Spallen's new play, in which a vigil for a drowned man becomes a truth-telling ordeal. In a coastal village in Northern Ireland, three local women reluctantly join artist Máirín (Cathy Belton), who is mourning her husband in her impeccably designed mansion above the sea. Suspicious of her wealth and talent, the visitors form a caustic chorus over the course of a nightmarish drunken night.
In Jim Culleton's production, the elaborate staging evokes the marine setting that inspires Máirín's work as a textile artist with lengths of wool draped like fronds of seaweed. As she sits at her loom, she could be a woman from folklore, an outsider and a step-mother. Spallen's text hints at these mythical echoes, while turning a sharp eye on small-town economic reality, property speculation and murky dealings.
As revelations multiply, not only of Máirín's husband's infidelity but of his involvement in violent crime, a battle for dominance ensues between Máirín and the town's chief fixer, Clodagh. Played with menacing wit as a sort of mafia boss by Eleanor Methven, she takes the play in a more lurid direction.
Spallen's gift for explosive dialogue is reinforced here. This time she works larger themes into the women's verbal jousting, so many, in fact, that it is not always clear what the main focus is. Post-peace-process politics, the environment, inequality, class envy, the role of the artist: all of these are tossed around, leaving the impression of a whirlpool of ideas, and a writer with big ambitions.
