Project Arts Centre, Dublin
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As implausible as it sounds, Dublin’s bitterly divided Luas lines will one day be connected. So, squeezed together in a busy tram carriage, why shouldn’t the two characters in Eva O’Connor’s new play for Fishamble?
Here, the guarded Maz (played by O’Connor) applies the finishing touches to her cardboard placard, en route to a Repeal the Eighth demonstration in the wake of a fresh tragedy, while the voluble Bricks (Stephen Jones) conducts an intimate confession about the night before, on his phone, loud enough to involve her.
Within minutes, they have shared significant chapters of their life stories: he is the choice-agnostic, besotted father of a Frozen-obsessed four-year-old; she is militantly pro-choice, having travelled abroad for an abortion. "Wow," whistles the engaging Jones in managed amazement, "and I thought I was an over-sharer."
O’Connor’s play, in narrative and style, is explicitly concerned with problems of connection and contrivance. As Maz and Bricks go their separate ways, coiling back into one another’s paths in unlikely circumstances, the dialogue sheaves into monologues, conducted in a near verse of consistent internal rhymes. Just as Bricks will later admire the slogans of the march, “all chanting and rhyming, all clever phrasing”, it’s a style that draws attention to itself, where public utterance comes in prose and the private is all poetry. Of Dublin’s patriarchal statuary, which Maz imagines tearing down, she observes, “the men on their pedestals, safe in their stone, phallic and towering, erect and alone”.
Both Maz and Bricks are isolated by shame, though, rattling inside them, ready to be shared. When Bricks narrowly prevents a combative Maz from one drastic action, they spend the day together, and an affection develops in strange shunts, and personal revelations (her abuse and estrangement, his brother’s suicide) ebb and flow between a Capel Street bar and Stephen’s Green, looping back to the Rosie Hackett bridge.
Fittingly, the slabs of contemporary urban design inspire Maree Kearns’ set, which, like the relationship, is nicely tiered and staggered, handsomely reshaped by Sinéad McKenna’s lights into internal sanctuaries or external spaces that glow from beneath. Shifts in character happen much more abruptly; Bricks’ stance on abortion, for instance, swivels in a jiffy, while Maz leaps from protecting sarcasm to destructive despair with such volatility her internal monologue has trouble tracing it.
It leads an intimate play towards eruptive action, as though only grand gestures could presage any meaningful change. O'Connor conveys more about connection and loss in its modest moments, though, when her characters possess both rhyme and reason. Runs until May 13
