Witness

Everyman Theatre, Cork

***

The four people who know Shannon's mobile telephone number are her son, her employer, her AA sponsor and her solicitor. She is a refugee from her own life and its only witness. This new one-act play from Carmel Winters uses material from her acclaimed film Snap and offers a double role to Kate Stanley Brennan as both Shannon and her delinquent son Stephen.

It is possible, of course, that Stephen is not delinquent at all, and Shannon’s purpose in addressing what may be a camera or a camera crew is to argue that a damaged child could grow up to do harm without becoming a tabloid monster. This mumbling, stumbling adolescent has abducted a small child; as the victim of childhood abuse and a kettle rather than a cauldron of resentments, all the boy wants is someone to care for, and the thin thread of horror underneath the plot provides a tension that gives shape to what is perhaps too overtly a narrative rather than a drama.

Shannon, a victim herself who was pregnant at 15, has a gutsy approach to life that relies largely on denial and blinds her to what’s happening to her son; Brennan’s sharp-edged performance reflects the dangers of Shannon’s impatient realism and, mercifully, doesn’t pretend to any enlightened sympathy. Nor is there much for Stephen, for whom Brennan exaggerates her accent to the point of incoherence.

The crisp and well-aimed writing suggests that 55 minutes are not enough for an excavation of motives in a familial and social hinterland of this density, although Winters is characteristically brave in attempting such a compact treatment. Still, the undertow of implication and the loss to family strife of so many of Ireland's children are inescapable and weighty, and when Shannon says that it's all her fault, we have to agree. Until Saturday 14th