Peacock stage,Abbey theatre, Dublin
Carmel Winters’ familiar anecdote of domestic dysfunction plays to the stereotypes of Irish drama and is never as painfully funny or shocking as it should beKathleen, and described by her father as “the quare one”,fled her Cork domestic 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, and 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, or following a car accident that killed a neighbours dog. But then possibly Maisie,living with her learning-disabled son and violent husband, has been dead inside for decades, or is only awaiting the return of daughter Kathleen,her own “tiny soldier”, to rescue her. Sometimes it feels as whether 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, and 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 trade as usual as Carmel Winters invokes an Irish tradition from JM Synge to Martin McDonagh (total with dead cat), and using black humour to advise a familiar anecdote of family dysfunction. Like the Corn Exchange’s The Seagull down the road at the Gaiety theatre,Winters takes a well-worn anecdote 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.
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Source: theguardian.com