The director Ian Rickson has an exceptional gift for transmitting what it feels like to be in a scene. In Jerusalem he literally made audiences smell the countryside: woodsmoke and petrol. In his production of The Nest, first seen at the Lyric Belfast last month, he lets you into the action stealthily. While the theatre is still in darkness, PJ Harvey’s music begins as a bell-like pulse. When the lights go up, you see not human life but unyielding nature. Alyson Cummins’s design has arid rocks at the front and, at the side, encroaching bushes. Then you see that it is in this hard place that domestic life is perched.
The Nest is an unflinching play about the corrosive effects of poverty. It is a parable about toxic waste by Franz Xaver Kroetz, Germany’s most often performed contemporary playwright. The pivotal scene shows a child being burned as waters lap reassuringly. This is the hinge that moves the drama, only a little creakily, from the personal to the political. What begins as a study of a hard-up couple turns into a condemnation of malpractice, even a plea for unionisation. Conor McPherson’s translation moves the action without strain to Ireland.
Caoilfhionn Dunne and Laurence Kinlan are powerful. She, without a mite of colour in her face, walking as if on eggshells. He, a bit of a chancer and a bit of charmer, rosy but desperate: “There’s more to life than mental health.” There is uplift at the end but the unremitting intensity takes its toll on the pace. Detail is a double-edged sword. Some of the most striking episodes stretch the patience most: there is a long sequence when a suicide attempt gradually turns to farce. Yet the smallest of touches reach the heart. The baby is never seen; he is just a presence suggested by the cup of his mother’s hands, the careful way she folds a plaid rug around an empty space. As if to say: love is not something you find; you create it.
