The Beacon review: An absorbing thriller about blood thirst

A famous artist relocates to an island cottage - the spot where she's suspected of having murdered her husband - in Nancy Harris's new play. Photo: Robbie Jack 

Gate Theatre, Dublin

★ ★ ★ ★

“Have you noticed how much death features in your work?” someone asks a famous artist in Druid and the Gate Theatre’s new play The Beacon. For someone less controversial than Beiv (Jane Brennan), this might simply be an observation about their art. But having relocated to an island cottage - the exact spot where she’s suspected of having murdered her husband - the question is grimly ironic.

In Nancy Harris’s absorbing thriller, Beiv’s innocence is so ambiguous, even her son Colm (Marty Rea), visiting from San Francisco, believes she has something to hide. When he leaves her alone with his new wife Bonnie (Rae Gray), Beiv’s marriage advice sounds a little like motivation for murder. (“Why did you get married so young?”). Director Garry Hynes’s production leans into the suspense, facing Beiv away from us to deliver lines so delicious they’d probably be culpable up close.

Like John Ford or JP Dunleavy, Harris knows that Ireland is a destination for Americans seeking profound escape. Beiv’s unconventionality - in art and in her choice of past lovers - acts upon Bonnie, who longs for something other than her family’s traditional values. If Gray’s performance fizzes with enthusiasm and intrigue, Brennan’s palette is piquant and dry. “Am I in your way?” asks Bonnie, examining a still life. “A bit,” says Beiv. 

Since her lead performance in 2006’s Alice Trilogy, it’s been difficult to know where to place Brennan, an actor well suited to subtle realism. She didn’t quite find the music in DruidShakespeare: Richard III. But her superb performance here merits more than faint praise. As an actor with smooth-edged nuance and control, she makes Beiv unshowy yet angled, a down-to-earth celebrity.

Against the vibrant seashore view of Francis O’Connor’s cottage set, the characters’ psychological illusions unravel, as if watching Bergman in Technicolor. “She thinks you’re her beacon,” says Beiv, telling her son that Bonnie is enthralled by a fantasy of being rescued. This is the main delusion in Harris’s play, also falling upon Colm’s former lover Donal (Ian-Lloyd Anderson), a gay man once believing he was being saved from small town life.

If there is fault in the plot, it’s that Harris - much like Bonnie when she overthinks one of Beiv’s paintings - tries to do too much. The exposition detailing Colm and Donal’s rather complicated relationship is difficult to disguise. The arrival of a podcaster (Dan Monaghan) obsessed with the death of Beiv’s husband mightn’t advance the plot that much, but it does allow a cultural fascination with murder to rear its head. 

That makes the play’s genre seem like its subject: a thriller about blood-thirst. When Marty Rea’s tormented Colm finally learns the truth, discovering a tragedy that’s stealthily shaped their lives, what unsettles the most isn’t the killing. It’s the flicker of excitement. 

Runs until Oct 26th.