"I have spent a lifetime trying to create perfect form. The finished, rounded, perfect form. Mistake - colossal fucking blunder," rages the dying sculptor Nell Jeffrey in Thomas Kilroy's new play. Nell's realisation is that the modernist search for formal perfection is an impossible grail, that the true imaginative work in contemporary society is being done by scientists, and that "to be human you have to live with failure."
These are wise conclusions, the end of a credible arc that the character traces as she faces death battling with her fear of artistic incompletion. It is deeply ironic, however, that the satisfaction these insights might provide is marred by Kilroy's inability to flesh out the emotional, human side of his story. For the play takes on even larger issues than Nell's artistic struggles: it is about artists as parents, about the juggling of passions and responsibilities. It is also about Nell's two adult daughters, who are deeply damaged by the artist's iconoclastic and (in her daughter Judith's words) "egotistical" pursuit of her desires and instincts.
The play moves back and forth between 2002 and 1972, the year the elder daughter, Grace, fled the family, for reasons that Judith finally makes it her business to understand. The secret that is revealed is indeed terrible, so terrible that it demands a reckoning that Kilroy does not provide.
Late in the play, Nell alludes to a conversation in which Grace cryptically told her to "finish it". I left the theatre wishing desperately that I had seen that conversation played out on stage. Is Nell a flawed genius or a monster; or is Kilroy saying that one predicates the other? Huge, brave questions, but ones left too open.
Lynne Parker does yeoman work trying to fill in the gaps with a production of enormous warmth and precision, and Sara Kestelman is stunning as Nell, as believably erratic and enfeebled at 82 as she is vibrant and sexualised at 52. Justine Mitchell is hugely convincing as the erratic, damaged Grace. I only wished the wonderful Eleanor Methven had more to work with as Judith, who serves mostly to move the plot along. John Comiskey and Alan Farquharson designed and lit the gorgeously monumental artist's workshop set, on which I wish I had watched the final, missing act of this ambitious, underrealised play.
· Until November 1. Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222.
