A psychotherapist's patient is stealing memories in Seanan McDonnel's sharply clever play. Photo: Myles Shelly
Smock Alley Theatre (Boys' School), Dublin
Jan 29-Feb 2
★ ★ ★
“What would you say if I told you I can steal people’s memories?” someone asks with curiosity, early in Seannan McDonnell’s new play for Sugar Coat Theatre. Sinéad (Charlene Craig), a polite and worried patient, is either interested in the boundaries of her therapist’s practice or confessing to having supernatural abilities.
It’s easy for David (Matthew Malone), a rational Jungian psychotherapist, to dismiss his patient’s question as hyperbole. Yet, troubled by a locket from his ex-wife, which he can’t pry open before triggering a security alarm, he might be in a drama dabbling in more than realism.
This sharply clever play seems interested in laying psychotherapy bare. In the company of his mordant colleague Julianne (Megan Riordan), David defends his extortionate fee and shares rehearsed responses to his patients’ devastating revelations. There’s even a summary of Jungian philosophy to explain his view that people are plagued by self-sacrifice and feelings of resentment.
When we find Sinéad in therapy, she discusses how she’s overwhelmed by minor embarrassments, by memories of her dead father, and a mother who spent a lifetime offended by one unguarded comment. When David makes a connection to Jung, Sinéad surprisingly attacks the philosopher’s reputation for believing in magic and being anti-Semitic. She also seems to have walked in equipped with the confidential memories of a past patient. This must be a psychotherapist’s worst nightmare.
McDonnell has made great fun out of inextricable events before, particularly in the compelling End. Of. Not many playwrights are as imaginative at introducing ideas and tracking metaphors. But wordy theories about the root of the human mind start to pile up in So Where Do We Begin?. It begs the question: Where do we all end?
One stark hypothesis comes from Sinéad, pitched somewhere between anxiety and reckoning in Charlene Craig’s fine performance, who describes lifetimes of memories defined by absence.
That vision should stir but it doesn’t. You can tell director Aoife Spillane-Hinks has put a lot of work into the cast’s delivery of a complex script but elsewhere the production seems blanched of ideas. The office set by Naomi Faughnan - the most in-demand designer at the moment - is inert, while Conleth White’s lighting effects sometimes come across as simplistic.
In performance, Matthew Malone is fascinatingly bluff as David but he’s mostly instructive, and doesn’t deliver the terror accompanying the plot’s trajectory. The most fun to watch is Megan Riordan, her Julianne ultimately lonely but delightfully cynical. (“That is the most calculating thing I’ve ever heard,” she denounces at one point. “I love it”).
The play’s most intriguing suggestion - that we’re all just preying on each other’s inadequacies - is fun to ponder. It’s just not something this production can convince us of.
No comments:
Post a Comment