There are three kinds of sorrow, one character explains in Marina Carr’s latest play, which goes on to portray gradations of suffering that seem innumerable. Laced with black comedy in the first half, its grim subject matter is initially kept at a distance in Caitríona McLaughlin’s sleek co-production for Landmark Productions and the Abbey theatre.
Looser in structure than Carr’s adaptations of Greek myth, its setting is the present or recent past, with echoes of fairytales and gothic legends. When we first meet mysterious adult-children Mac (Anna Healy), Grass (Marie Mullen) and Purley (Nick Dunning), their ritualised party games come with strict rules and fluorescent costumes, reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. Their domain is a cavernous basement dominated by two steep staircases, designed by Jamie Vartan to suggest a portal to another world.
It is all playfully surreal, until we watch them bully a fourth character, Audrey (Aisling O’Sullivan), who swiftly changes from victim to their intimidating master. As it emerges that Mac, Grass, Purley and Audrey are ghosts, these ebullient spirits seem much more vivid than the “real” couple in the house: Maria (Zara Devlin) and David (Patrick Martins), grieving for the death of their baby.
Played with mordant humour by O’Sullivan, Audrey intervenes in the human world, past and present. Carr’s script bends time startlingly, depicting the ghosts of children not yet born. These are the lucky ones, escaping the inevitable pain of human life. This is emphasised when the production moves closer to awkward realism, with Maria and David visiting Maria’s embittered parents.
The sudden death of first one child, then another, prompts questions about responsibility, as the bereaved want to know who, or what, is to blame. In this none-too-credible “real” world, tragedy topples into melodrama, in overwrought dialogue revealing deeper layers of grief. Just how many children have died mysteriously in this family, in cot deaths, through illness, accident – or perhaps a particularly malign fate?
Carr is asking why such terrible things are repeated through three generations, cyclically. Yet the drawn-out ending and shift in tone away from the compellingly strange realm of the ghosts dilute the impact of these disturbing questions.
