Before You Say Anything review: Multiple stories forced into an elegant flawed play

Three seemingly unrelated stories about people unsafe from the police merge in Malaprop's new play. Photo: Simon Lazewksi

Dublin Castle - Chapel Royal, Dublin Fringe Festival

★ ★ 

Compact enough for a single sitting, and meticulously constructed towards a desired effect, a play and a short story might have some things in common. 

In a recent interview Claire O’Reilly, director of Malaprop’s new play Before You Say Anything, spoke about the nature of short stories, how they can combine age-old desires for understanding where we come from with the jolt of contemporary life and its anxieties. That brilliantly sums up Malaprop’s excellent 2017 play Everything Not Saved, which didn’t resemble a short story but an anthology. It featured three stories about performers that seemed at first unrelated but began to subtly speak to each other, one actor’s tale of self-invention bouncing off another’s meditation on posterity, finishing with a stunning episode that had been floating in the background about Maria Rasputin as a circus performer in 1920s Berlin. 

Playwright Dylan Coburn Gray and the company use this elegant structure again in Before You Say Anything, though proceedings feel a lot more signposted. Setting a heavy tone of unrest, a woman arrives into the Chapel Royal dressed in black (Maeve O’Mahony), singing a song with a liturgical melody: “Inside my head there is a universe ... There’s no room for me because of what you did”. 

This haunting weightiness quickly gets replaced by a completely different energy, an aristocrat arriving butt naked (Peter Corboy), fleeing from a situation where he could have been exposed as gay. It is 1890s London, the same moment as Oscar Wilde’s trial, and Corboy’s man hungrily gossips about past dalliances. His mood darkens as he talks about the dangers of being arrested on suspicion, of having no right to due process. But in an irreverent, exaggerated reality like an R-rated comedy of manners, this sincerity is a hard sell.  

It's an irony between centuries when Corboy disappears as a gay playboy in one story and reappears as a priest in the next. The second story is set in 1980s London, and sees a black woman arriving naked in a church (Ghaliah Conroy), escaping her abusive husband. The priest gives her clothes from a donation box and tries to help while the police make racist assumptions about her being a prostitute. The scene bubbles with intrigue but surprisingly falls flat, eliciting a tonne of exposition from Corboy’s priest without any compelling tension. 

There is a satisfying ping in the brain when subtle cues make connections between separate components. But Before You Say Anything insists heavily on the links between its stories, as director O’Reilly and designer Molly O’Cathain send dramatic atmospherics through them with the surge of Suzie Cummins’s lighting, the electro-pop of Jennifer O’Malley’s music, and the impressive movement of Ghaliah Conroy’s choreography.  

There is an arch play in here somewhere about people being unsafe from the peacekeepers, building as it does to the funeral of journalist Dara Quigley whose privacy was woefully betrayed by police. That a gay man and a black woman are seen as the faces of the same police force might say something about complicity, it might say something about the erasure of law enforcement history, or it might suggest that this story anthology could have done with another edit. 

Runs until 11th September.