Epiphany review: Druid’s new play has too many ghosts not enough plot

In Brian Watkins's new play, guests at a dinner party try to solve what the Epiphany is about. Photo: Robbie Jack

Town Hall Theatre, Galway International Arts Festival

★ ★

In an old townhouse, where walls reach high with the grandeur of a past era, Morkan (Marie Mullen) is making final preparations for a dinner party. The most important guest, her nephew Gabriel, will explain the purpose of the gathering. “He has the speech,” she says. 

Readers of The Dead will find the characters and events of Brian Watkins’s new play very familiar. Except James Joyce’s magnificent short story, and John Huston’s snow-covered film adaptation, immortalised those scenes from an Epiphany celebration. Here no one seems to know what the Christian feast is about. 

This becomes a daft mystery to be solved by everyone who arrives into this house, which in Francis O’Connor’s attractive design is subtly decaying yet stylishly modern. Receiving a gay interracial couple (Jude Akuwudike and Marty Rea), a twenty-something who practices veganism for political reasons (Julia McDermott), among others, this is an old room for new faces. So too is Druid’s production, its international cast marking an intriguing departure for the company. 

It's a sign of the current age that Gabriel, the much-needed messenger, is so beset by depression that he cannot show up. His partner Aran, played with near-otherworldly assurance by Grace Byers, attends in his absence.
  
Lost for a revelation about the Epiphany, the party instead discover and participate in other customs. One guest brings a French cake accompanied by an absurd table game. Another plays the infuriating disharmony of contemporary music on the piano. Comically presented in director Garry Hynes’s production, rife with overheard confusions and door-opening gags, it’s a lively party, seating some seriously elegant costumes designed by Doreen McKenna.

Whether or not you appreciate the Joycean paralysis, the anti-climactic echoes of Waiting for Godot, or the narrative threads unfinished like Bailegangaire, this is a play more haunted by other artworks than it is something that stands on its own. How plausible is it that Morkan, though utterly effervescent in Marie Mullen’s performance, still doesn’t know what the Epiphany is about. She keeps reminding her guests of the extensive research she’s conducted.

With everyone arranged face-front like The Last Supper, discussing whether civilisation is heading for new heights or sinking in the toilet, the play best resembles a panoply of voices. There’s some interesting disagreement between a calculating psychiatrist and an eye-opening artist. Sadly, such contributions aren’t developed enough to spark compelling friction.

As the details of yet another absent friend - supposedly beloved by all and still their fate somehow a mystery - becomes clear, the plot seems too driven by outside forces. By The Dead, in particular, whose main event, a song performance of The Lass of Aughrim, ushers in a tragedy here that feels more like an addendum than a long-arc game. 

That leaves a waste of some extraordinary talent. Have I mentioned that Bill Irwin is in here somewhere? 


Runs until Jul 27th.