Bewley’s Café Theatre

Fiona Looney’s monologue play tells the immediately gripping story of a family torn apart by sudden tragedy. Unfortunately, what it lacks is a plot.

Played out as a simple exercise in first-person storytelling, the action is entirely past-tense; its central character, the suffering mother Marie, reliving the events of the days, weeks and years following her 13-year old son Brian’s sudden disappearance. Marie has accepted the purgatorial fate thrust upon her as the unsolved mystery continues to obsess her. In the opening and closing moments, she sifts through the carpet hoping to find some of the nuts and bolts that Brian used to secrete around the house, as if they will provide clues to what happened to him. Really, however, she is waiting for death, which she hopes will give her some answers. The play is thus pure reminiscence and it lacks any dramatic arc of its own.

Maree Kearn’s dated 1970s living-room set adds a much-needed layer of metaphorical depth to the literal dramaturgy, underscoring the way Marie is stuck in the past, reliving the trauma of her son’s unexplained disappearance day by day. Looney writes with a keen ear for demotic language, and Marie is a thoroughly recognisable and relatable character. However, there isn’t much art to her manipulation of the monologue form, and little in the sense of theatricality. Marie’s monologue might well be a first-person testament from a newspaper article or a short story, and there is little that director Michael James Ford can do to enhance the static soliloquy.

The wonderful Deirdre Donnelly gives an affecting performance as Marie, but there is a troubling lack of psychological depth in the writing. Looney has managed to sculpt a compelling story from a not unfamiliar missing-person case. However, it isn’t quite successful as a play.

Runs until August 20