The strength of Joanne Ryan’s two-hander is in its quiet observational detail. It is not a play of momentous events or grand revelations, but a bittersweet portrait of a mother-daughter relationship complicated by mental illness.
In Sarah Jane Scaife’s unfussy production for Dublin’s Fishamble, Ryan eases us almost imperceptibly into a scenario inspired by the relationship with her own mother. A house extension is being built and a woman known simply as Mother (Pom Boyd) has to stay for a few weeks in the studio flat of the grownup Daughter (Karen McCartney). It is an open-ended arrangement subject to the weather and the speed of the building work.
