Paul Meade's new play asks where to place our faith after Irish institutions were discredited in the economic bust.
Civic Theatre
Mar 4-8
I saw
Faith by Paul Meade last week. While watching, it occurred to me how in the past year new plays about Recession Ireland and the demoralising realities of the economic crash have become more frequent. Carmel Winters'
Best Man, though more interested in sensationalist plotting, at least brought recent shifts in materiality and sexuality into play, while Colin Murphy's excellent docudrama
Guaranteed! showed how the collapse of a tiny bank brought an entire financial system to the brink of destruction.
Other writers saw how economic shifts are systematically linked to shifts in mental health. Stefanie Preissner's
Solpadeine is my Boyfriend was already a shinning pillar of this, a verse about the dissolution of a nation through emigration. Elizabeth Moynihan's dimmed
Marvel tried to shed some light on the mental decline of the scathed banker figure, while a monologue by Paul Kennedy for Smashing Times'
Witness brought us into a marriage strained by a bad investment and the arrival of the bailiffs. Ultimately, David Fennelly's
Fishes, currently running at Bewley's Cafe Theatre, feels the most exact in tracing the alienation felt in the country.
Into this category comes Meade's play about a laid off salesman and depressive played by Don Wycherley who's struggling to keep up the social obligations of he and his wife at the golf club.
