In the dictionary, the word "midden" is given as a dunghill, a refuse heap. In the Derry vernacular, it means, simply, a mess. In Morna Regan's new play for Rough Magic - here receiving its Irish premiere in the wake of winning a Fringe First at the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival - it is both.
In her first stage-play, Regan writes confidently about the people of her native city. The Sweeney family has long been a dumping ground for generations of suppressed bitterness, vexed relationships, tragic misunderstandings and terrible unmentioned secrets. It is the women who carry the burden in their hearts, putting on a brave face for the outside world. But, in old age, confusion and diminished inhibition can transform into lucidity and honesty, which allow uncomfortable truths to blow their lid and come tumbling out.
Barbara Adair's vacant, cantankerous Dophie has been driving her prematurely widowed daughter Dolores (Ruth Hegarty) and deceptively jolly granddaughter Aileen (Pauline Hutton) around the bend for years. But it takes the arrival home from America of Dolores's older daughter Ruth (Kathy Downes), a successful but volatile fashion designer, to cause Dophie's senile meanderings to erupt into a painful showdown, releasing the lethal gases from the dungill and offering a faint hope of cleansing and renewal.
Lynne Parker's pacey production successfully moves this well-observed play out of the realms of standard family drama and crafts a heightened but truthful portrayal of universal domestic conflict and complex mother-daughter relationships. Five strong performances persuasively wind us into the events of a homecoming, which goes full-circle, leaving behind a chink of light in the darkness.
This sell-out run is huge encouragement to The Playhouse, whose lively autumn programme is an excellent complement to the glossy delights of the new, multi- million pound Millennium Forum, just opened a few yards along away.
