Kathleen, described by her father as “the quare one”, fled her Cork home when she was a teenager, and she hasn’t been back since. But when news reaches her in London of the death of her mother, Maisie, she returns only to discover that Maisie is alive, although not entirely well – she is suffering from the delusion that she is a corpse, following a car accident that killed a neighbour’s dog. But then maybe Maisie, living with her learning-disabled son and violent husband, has been dead inside for decades, and is only awaiting the return of daughter Kathleen, her own “little soldier”, to rescue her. Sometimes it feels as if Irish drama is so busy looking back on itself that it can’t quite summon the energy to really look out on the world. At this year’s Dublin theatre festival there are plenty of shows that use the past to examine the present and even contemplate the future, but these are also the shows that redefine and reimagine what we mean by new writing and don’t necessarily subscribe to the primacy of the playwright in the creative process.
Meanwhile, over at the Peacock, it’s business as usual as Carmel Winters invokes an Irish tradition from JM Synge to Martin McDonagh (complete with dead cat), using black humour to tell a familiar story of family dysfunction. Like the Corn Exchange’s The Seagull down the road at the Gaiety theatre, Winters takes a well-worn story about the damage one generation inflicts on the next but refocuses it by making the protagonist female. As in that Seagull revival there are dividends, and Winters’ writing often has a bleak fierceness as it explores with unfettered honesty the way parents recruit children in their own wars and breed violence in them.
But in playing to some of the stereotypes of Irish drama – including the Dougal McGuire-like brother – Winters doesn’t always subvert them, and there is an uncertainty of tone in both the writing and Ellen McDougall’s production. The latter doesn’t ever decide whether to heighten the naturalism or play it straight, ramp up the absurd or encourage us to take events seriously. It means that as the revelations and blood begin to leak all over Fly Davis’s over-obvious burned-out kitchen design, nothing is as darkly, painfully funny and appallingly shocking as it should be.
Rachel O’Byrne is compelling as the returning Kathleen, a woman shorn of her curls and her illusions about herself, but sometimes the performances display a lack of conviction in the material. If a coffin is supposed to be heavy and difficult to manoeuvre, it should look as if the actors are genuinely struggling, and despite two fight directors listed in the programme, the kitchen-floor struggle is bungled. Winters and her characters really find their voice in the night-time truth-telling between mother and daughter, but the evening is tame, never as savagely comic or disturbing as it could be.
• At Abbey theatre, Dublin, until 29 October. Box office: 353 1 8787 222.
