Little One
Glass Mask Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
All adults, Dr Seuss once said, are just obsolete children. Glass Mask Theatre’s slippery thriller Little One seems to take the author’s put-down as its conceit.
In Ottawa, two siblings on the cusp of their 30s are anticipating a reunion after several years.
Aaron, a surgical resident – looking very serious in Dan Monaghan’s sly performance – begins listing a number of alarming incidents from their youth. Suddenly, he’s back in their family home, arguing on the couch with Claire, his violent young sister, played by Hannah Brady.
The Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch prefers the siblings to occasionally revert to their childhood selves – pivots nicely guided by Samantha Cade, the director of this absorbing production. (Moscovitch is well served by Canadian directors living in Dublin. In 2016 we had Lee Wilson’s staging of East of Berlin, another play about painful inheritances and family legacies.)
We’re told that brother and sister are adopted. Claire was found abandoned in a condemned building when she was four; she never shares her memories of those first years. Aaron’s parents died in a house fire one night when they were smoking in bed – a detail adult Aaron adds while stubbing out his own cigarette.
There are soon unsettling signs of past trauma, as the family tries to deal with the aftermath of a young Claire groping an adult neighbour, and Aaron is seen practising communication skills prescribed by a counsellor. (“I want to scratch your eyes out,” Claire says. “Want to do finger-painting?” Aaron replies.)
During one switch back to the present he has clearly run out of patience. “Claire is a monster. I don’t want to kill the suspense for you,” he says dramatically, before the play traces a turning point in their relationship, when Aaron, asked by his parents to sacrifice his hobbies in order to supervise his sister, is given a kitten nicknamed Little One.
Monaghan takes an inspired approach to Aaron, portraying the somewhat young surgeon as a square who’s boringly informal before his years. (He’s colourless in a muted shirt and cardigan, in the nice details of Migle Ryan’s costuming.) That makes for an enjoyable contrast when he tries to convince as a moody teenager, folding his arms with a pout (“You psychopath!”).
But what about Claire? Brady gives a neat depiction of her youth, leaning into the emotionless chill of a creepy child who later learns some de-escalation tactics (“Curse word!” she cries). The character’s adult version lacks a point of view, though.
Imaginably, it’s hard to try to conceal the plot’s traumatic conclusion to Claire’s adolescence, while the script mostly has her adult version focus on the madness of someone else, a wife who lived next door. “His way of teasing her added to their normalcy,” she observes.
People can be dehumanised gradually, over time, their needs dismissed. Ironically, the play’s “monster” Claire becomes the sage on this. “It doesn’t mean our parents don’t love you,” she tells Aaron. “It means they don’t love you as much as they love me.”
Little One is at Glass Mask Theatre, Dublin 2, until Saturday, April 5th
