No Ordinary Fool

The play dramatically opens to the juxtaposition of a wedding celebration with a tragedy at sea. Between the two events, on the strandline, stand four women and a teenage boy called Sweeney (Conor MacNeill). The scene may be a chaotic one, but the tensions between the five are obvious and will only grow more so when Mairín (Cathy Belton) insists that the other three women stay with her through a bodiless wake for her drowned husband. For this location, on a remote part of the Co. Antrim coastline, is a place of secrets and certain ways of doing things. It is a world where someone as cultured and sophisticated as Mairín is treated with both hostile suspicion and barely concealed derision.

Mairín, though, is an assertive and somewhat pompous individual in her own right. Indeed, she has already fallen out rather badly with her stepdaughter Tríona (Samantha Heaney) as a result of this. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before she is obliquely locking horns with Clodagh (Eleanor Methven), a rough-looking woman who is the unofficial queen of the area and someone with an undeclared agenda of her own. Completing this motley crew of reluctant bedfellows then is Eileen (Fiona Bell), a cigarette-smoking, hard-drinking airhead.

Delivered in the colourful vernacular and heavy brogue of the locality, Abbie Spallen’s latest play washes up as far as the audience’s feet and ambitiously deposits there any number of themes – be it economic hardship, care for the environment, the legacy of thirty years of civil strife, personal relationships, land ownership, class distinctions, superstition, art, or life in close-knit communities. Clearly, none can be plumbed to any real depth. However, it is impressive how well this jumble of ideas are coherently meshed together here to form a work that is comic, suspenseful, dark, and, by the end, quite definitely unnerving.

Sabine Dargent’s drab-looking set is a hybrid of a disorderly atelier and a cold-looking living room. To one side, stands the empty wooden coffin, crowned, in occult fashion, by a ram’s head. Outside, the menacing crash of the waves and howl of the wind can be heard throughout. It all makes for an impersonal and unsettling location – a form of no man’s land to be fought over. Indeed, the central tussle between Mairín and Clodagh is a fantastic one to watch. Belton plays the former with a superb mixture of haughty superiority, alienated discomfiture, and vexed curiousity. Meanwhile, Methven provides a strong counterweight as the deceptive bully who does not care for those who do not fit in. That all said, the best lines are typically reserved for the seemingly wise-beyond-his-years Sweeney during his occasional appearances onstage.

As directed by Jim Culleton, this play from the Fishamble Theatre Company is a hugely compelling and innovative depiction of a place that seems to move with the times, but equally seems free of their influence. Indeed, on an island where many dark deeds have been perpetrated by a few with the tacit consent of an unquestioning majority, Strandline gets to the heart of the secrecy, intolerance, and cruelty that seem to exist in virtually unquestioned fashion here. An uneasy but gripping watch, on the whole.

Photos – Anthony Woods