Playwright Phillip McMahon and composer Raymond Scannell follow up their satirical musical Alice in Funderland with this much more sombre take on life in contemporary Dublin. Described as “a play within music”, their new collaboration portrays one working-class woman’s story of endurance – of deprivation, violence, addiction and tragedy – in a life spent between Birmingham and Dublin.
Now in her late 60s, Ellen (Barbara Brennan) faces upheaval again. The inner-city Dublin flat that has been her home for 27 years is being sold for office space, and her only option is to move in with her sister in the suburbs, in “poxy Lucan”. With her life’s possessions in plastic sacks and boxes around her, Ellen is a Mother Courage figure, ferocious yet vulnerable, on a threshold between past and present.
The unexpected arrival of a young visitor from England, Rachel (Fia Houston-Hamilton), pulls her back into her memories. Ellen’s grim life story is performed through dialogue, song, movement and music. An on-stage trio of musicians – on piano, clarinet and harp – play Scannell’s score behind a transparent screen. Barbara Brennan’s startling transitions between speech and a Tom Waits-style rasp give her a heightened presence, expressing fragility as well as brittleness.
The juxtaposition of jerky, puppet-like choreography, recitative, and incantatory singing creates an eerie atmosphere. This is enhanced by Sarah Jane Shiels’s dappled lighting and Paul O’Mahony’s semi-abstract set, dominated by a Georgian window. It seems fitting, in this twilight zone, that one of the characters moving around behind Ellen – sometimes dancing or cartwheeling – is, in fact, dead. An embodied memory of her son Will (Conall Keating), he functions as a chorus, unseen by anyone except Ellen.
If the production, directed by McMahon, had sustained its through-composition and the otherworldly, operatic tone, it might have succeeded in being a highly impressionistic and evocative piece. Instead, the musical component recedes, and the sporadic songs seem to pull against the dialogue, which increasingly moves into confessional, whiskey-and-truth-telling mode. The different elements sit clumsily at times. Meanwhile, the character of Ellen’s upstairs neighbour Katarina (Kate Gilmore) is a very broadly sketched device for prompting further exposition of Ellen and Rachel’s intimately connected family history.
“You’re a fighter, Ma,” Will tells Ellen, but she is losing her will to fight, and seems resigned to moving out. “I am just taking up space,” she says. “I spent me life fighting to end up taking up space.” In a spontaneous gesture towards the pregnant Katarina, Ellen seems to suggest that it’s up to the next generation to keep up this fight to be seen, to be heard and to have a better chance in life. In this sometimes awkward and always impassioned piece, McMahon and Scannell are making sure that she, and others like her, are not going quietly.
• At Abbey theatre, Dublin, until 9 July. Box office: +3531 8787222.
