Molly Sweeney
Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire
★★★★☆
It can’t have been a complete accident that, when pondering the limits and consolations of blindness, Brian Friel delivered a work that could function perfectly well as a radio play. No offence is intended to Ciaran Bagnall’s fluid lighting and exquisitely balanced set for Decadent Theatre Company’s revival of this 1994 play. Both are models of good taste. But the narrative is conveyed through language alone. As in Dancing at Lughnasa – its premiere still fresh in the mind when Molly Sweeney opened – there is here a wild, mad, clattering dance, but we must settle for just a fevered description from a transported title character.
This was, of course, not the first time that Friel had composed a play as three monologues for characters who do not interact on stage. His Faith Healer used the same tricks 15 years previously.
Andrew Flynn’s production here arranges the characters on odd chairs at the vertices of a triangle. In the centre (and rear when at rest) Genevieve Hulme-Beaman is salty and lyrical as Molly. To our left we have Denis Conway as the pompous – possibly past-his-best – ophthalmic surgeon Dr Rice. To the right is Manus Halligan as Molly’s hobbyist husband, Frank.
We soon learn that Molly grew up blind. Her opening speech describes a childhood experiencing nature without the benefit of light and colour. The set places us somewhere between the seeing and the unseeing: a walled garden arranged before a hazy maritime scene. It is, of course, Co Donegal (this is, remember, a Brian Friel play), but we are also in a philosophical space.
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Inspired by the Oliver Sacks essay To See and Not See, the play has Dr Rice and Frank settle upon Molly as a project. Played with a convincing trainspotter’s focus by Halligan, a handsome gangly figure, the husband could, it seems, as easily have focused on beekeeping or the affairs of Ethiopia, but, assured by Rice that a cure may be possible, he pushes his wife towards a life-changing operation.
Neither man seems to notice her trepidation. Friel powerfully captures the blind human’s familiarity with darkness. She pities sighted swimmers for their inability to surrender totally to the enveloping sea. As the operation approaches, she fears the arrival of “homesickness” (a pungent metaphor). Afterwards, she finds isolation.
The sense of ownership that Halligan and Conway spill over their human guinea pig makes a metaphysical Pygmalion of the drama. Hulme-Beaman is up to the task of a defiant, ultimately damaged Eliza. Sharpening the corners of the northwest accent, the actor leans into dialogue that, unlike that of the two men, brushes against the poetic.
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For all the fine ideas and for all the elegance of the current staging, the play still comes off as a tad static. Coming after the recent transcendent Lughnasa at the Gate, Molly Sweeney keeps its feet stubbornly on the Donegal soil. It sometimes wears its research heavily. But few will emerge untroubled by the quandaries raised. “Seeing is not understanding,” someone says. Very true.
Continues at the Pavilion, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 6th
