Four people, fatally disconnected in a metaphor for insularity, confess their reasons for participating in the flight from the Blaskets in An Island's Lament. Played confessionally to an audience gathered in the bleak, three-storey main corridor of the old
Cork Jail, Mary Hoey's dramatic structure is frail but is held together by potent writing and committed performances.
Sean Healy, Aine O'Leary, Conor Tallon and Sandy Sheridan present their characters with a conviction which belies contradictory props and costuming - Aine O'Leary's Maire makes tea and bread on stage, which demands some skill, as does peeling potatoes with a carving knife.
Directed by Tim Murphy of Brown Penny, the play's only unifying factor is the family's shared grief at leaving young, dead Donal behind. However, the fact that Donal is buried on the mainland (where everyone is going) is given as an example of doctrinaire cruelty, his fallacious island burial occurring only in his mother's vision of angels and babies. That core contradiction makes it hard to understand what all the fuss is about.
An Island's Lament is on tour . One line More to come
