No Drama Theatre returned to the intimate Boys School space in Smock Alley Theatre for a distinctly multi-media appearance in the Scene and Heard Festival.
Eileen (Helen McGrath) is burdened by griefs public and private. The public knows that her husband (Greg Freegrove) shockingly killed himself on the night of their daughter’s birthday. They don’t know that the reason Eileen came home to find his body in the bathroom that night was because she had left her daughter and husband to continue her affair with her work colleague (Andrei Callanan). Consumed with a guilt that she cannot explain without inviting judgement, she is further tormented by her husband’s unusual choice of suicide note – a message on a tape recorder. This vivid reminder of his living presence keeps her looping around and around their time together, from their first accidental meeting in a crowded cafe where he politely asked if he could share her table, to her unlocking the bathroom door on their fateful last night.
It’s thrilling to see the difficult playing space used so well by writer/director Ciaran Treanor and producer Andrei Callanan. Multimedia projection of video footage of the once happy couple made it seem as if we were glimpsing inside Eileen’s head and reliving her memories as she reacts to them, while the use of recorded sound cues for moments of physical theatre made them truly pop, in particular Eileen’s desperate hammering on the bathroom door. Greg Freegrove’s sinister reappearance as a spectre with a distinctly voodoo air was made even more startling when the lights went out revealing his clothes to be daubed in glow in the dark patterns. Indeed there was a hint of the Babadook about him, as what is left of him in his wife’s mind has become dark and twisted, eager to urge her to suicide.
Helen McGrath ably carries the play as a woman looping around and around in a depressive spiral, wondering if a good, quiet man killed himself because of what she did, even though his suicide note didn’t blame her. Can she ever know for sure? A fantasy dance sequence appropriately scored by the Bynon Remix of Sofi Tukker’s ‘Good Time Girl’ sees Eileen and her two lovers break out of their looping flashbacks and guilt-trips into something new and strange. As Elevator Repair Service and tgSTAN showed in theatre festivals past even the simplest choreography erupting out of nowhere and being sustained creates a moment of pure theatre. Treanor and his frequent collaborator Noel Cahill have used rap and sustained rhyming before, largely for laughs, but here things become more incantatory; at times, given the subject matter, veering towards verse drama.
The Father of My Daughter is like a theatrical concentrate, it only runs for a spare twenty minutes, but it packs the emotional punch of a longer play.
4/5
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