Sink review: A play excavating two women's lives and discovering too little

An archaeologist digs up a bog body in John O'Donovan's new play, but ends up uncovering the trauma of another woman. Photo: Keith Dixon 

Smock Alley Theatre - Boys' School, Dublin Fringe Festival
★ ★

“Going back doesn’t mean going backward,” says Ciara, an archaeologist whose excavation brings her somewhere close to home. The village in Sink - One Duck’s unearthly and wordy new play - brings more than a sodded bog body to the surface. Unusual memories begin to shift.

Ciara refuses to be pulled back into her past. The nicely controlled performance by Rachel Feeney doesn’t allow us to see too much of the childhood escape from her father, or the reasons behind avoiding her mother’s phone calls. But playwright John O’Donovan treats such determination like a delusion in a psychological drama. Going back indeed means going backward. When Ciara falls far into a painful memory, she falls deep. It’s just not her trauma.

Thomas Martin, the in-demand director also behind Collapsible and Lad at this year’s Fringe, is at the wheel here. He and O’Donovan found a lot of heart in the excellent comedy If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You. Comparatively, this fragmental monologue, swirling with detail, isn’t as coherent.

Standing atop a pillar of parched earth, Ciara becomes absorbed into a series of strange events in the village. The most surprising is her transformation into Bríd, a fraught woman struggling with alcoholism, who speaks in babbling stream-of-consciousness. Feeney’s eyes widen and voice warms, forming a gentle soul with much affection for children, saddened that she never had her own.

The two stories bind and interlock. Ciara chases down a hidden memory, leading her to a mysterious cottage. Bríd tries to rescue her marriage from herself, sneaking out of the house to hide her drinking. The otherworldly stage, under Cillian McNamara’s stunning lighting, unnerves with supernatural glows and swallows up with dark water. 

Through these elemental scenes, the connection between Ciara and Bríd remains frustratingly out of reach. “Our pain isn’t ours alone. It comes from the bottom up,” says Bríd, agonising over a brandy during a pretty moonlit walk.  That suggests that the play is about inherited trauma, a land literally embedded with suffering, until a summer drought cracks the earth and brings it to the surface. 

More specifically, this might be an excavation of a women’s history of suffering - of depression, addiction and male attacks. A history that inhabits the living and turns them into walking bog bodies. But it’s difficult to know what to make of Ciara’s final confrontation, how she and Bríd are connected, and what really is at the bottom of Sink. 


Runs until Sep 15th.