From high windows in a town square, a woman with two half-dressed men waves a whiskey bottle, defying onlookers. Everything in Tom Murphy’s 1998 play leads to this unforgettable sequence: a three-day debauch in a hotel, involving a returned emigrant, Vera (Aisling O’Sullivan), her brother-in-law and her old flame.
Annabelle Comyn has directed Murphy superbly before, and here she presents a series of compelling images. Opening with Vera silhouetted against a vast, star-lit sky, the scale of Paul O’Mahony’s semi-abstract set expands her story from 1990s West of Ireland into something mythic. Returning from New York to her native town to mourn her grandmother, Vera uncovers truths about her family that would sicken a woman with a weaker stomach.
A booze-fuelled sexual reunion with her former lover Finbar (Brian Doherty) is complicated by the intervention of her brother-in-law, Henry (Frank McCusker), a self-loathing solicitor on a binge. This strange trio, brilliantly portrayed, become the hotel squatters, while police, family and even a priest, circle around them as if this was an absurd hostage siege.
As Vera, O’Sullivan brings something of her recent reign as Henry V, in a riveting transition from raw grief to almost regal poise.
Murphy’s script is fuelled by fury: a response to Ireland’s hidden histories, which were exposed in the 1990s. It is all here: clerical abuse, the suffering of children in industrial schools, the attempt by a hypocritical, increasingly affluent society to incarcerate people as troublesome as Vera. While the pace dips, and not all of the cast are equal to the three leads, this production’s beauty and finesse throw into relief the sheer grubbiness of the society portrayed.
• At the Abbey theatre, Dublin, until 30 July. Box office: +353 1 878 7222.
