Druid take over the Town Hall Theatre for their premiere of a transatlantic offering for the Galway International Arts Festival.
Morkan (Marie Mullen) is hosting a dinner party with the assistance of Loren (Julia McDermott). The perpetually drunken Freddy (Aaron Monaghan) is the first to arrive, to the disappointment of Morkan who is awaiting her celebrated nephew Gabriel Conroy, a critic for the Review, who has promised to make a speech. Her old friend Ames (Bill Irwin) slips and slides in from the snow, as do Marty Rea and Jude Akuwudike’ musicians, and the supercilious couple of Rory Nolan’s marketer Rory Nolan and Kate Kennedy’s psychiatrist. It quickly becomes clear that nobody has read the attachments to the invitation, or indeed done more than scan the invitation, and all Morkan’s plans for elaborate festivities will come to naught. And then Aran (Grace Byers) unexpectedly arrives, bearing the news that her partner Gabriel will not be joining them. And so the party begins…
Director Garry Hynes stages proceedings deliberately chaotically, so much so that at a few points I thought of all the guests roaring about the mansion after Tim Curry in Clue. There are some comic tours-de-force: Rea’s attempt to get Mullen to feed him the words and music of a song he is pretending to know, his brilliantly performed piano piece that to paraphrase John McGahern at every moment has as much reason to stop as to go on (to the consternation of Nolan’s attempts to applaud it out of existence), Irwin’s injury with a carving knife which leads him to decline coffee beans being applied to the wound because he’d be up all night, and Kennedy’s 11 probing questions that Akuwudike furiously claims to have permanently shattered Rea’s mind by making him ask of his remaining lifespan – is it enough?
But these frivolities sit uneasily beside the fact that Brooklyn playwright Brian Watkins is clearly meditating on James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, not that that was highlighted in publicity. Francis O’Connor’s impressive set with its multiple staircases creates a sense of a beloved brownstone with snow constantly seen falling thru the windows, and, in the end, of course, thru the strange black hole in the roof of the living room; that the snow might fall on all the living and the dead. Watkins has borrowed from Joyce occasion, character names and traits, and, rather astonishingly, the singing of the ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ for an epiphanic moment. And these are characters badly in need of an epiphany as they struggle sans schmartphones to remember just what Epiphany is meant to celebrate, and flail around confusedly trying to create a secular celebration.
Epiphany has a number of memorable set-pieces, its muted ending with old friends Irwin and Mullen seeing out the night is affecting, but it’s not as revelatory as hoped.
3.5/5
Epiphany continues its run at the Galway Town Hall Theatre until the 27th of June.
Talking Movies 