Frank (Peter Hanly) has spent his life raising goats, making cheese and volunteering in Africa. His current project is restoring his wife’s vision. For this, he has been doing a lot of research. He has discovered that a blind man can know a cube by touch, but if his sight were restored, that single sense would not be enough on its own to recognise the object.
The inspiration for Molly Sweeney, Brian Friel’s 1994 play, was an appointment with an optician. Frank has developed a blind spot to the question, but the dramatist puts it squarely to us: might it be just as terrifying to gain your sight as to lose it?
Molly (Dawn Bradfield) can identify flowers by texture and smell, but hasn’t been able to make out their shapes and colours since she was 10 months old. By honing her other senses, she has developed a unique knowledge bank. When she swims, the other bathers should be jealous, because she feels the water on every pore of her skin. She can deftly weave through a crowd and recognises her friends. On the eve of an operation that could restore her vision, she worries that if it is successful, she will never know thosepeople again.
With a dread that seems to hang above the physical activity, the ophthalmologist Mr Rice (Michael Byrne) remembers watching Molly and Frank arrive for the operation “one head alert, one head bowed”.
“Even though she was in the hands of the best team in the whole world to deliver her miracle,” he says, with reverberating trepidation, “because she was in the hands of the best team in the whole world, I was fearful. I suddenly knew that that courageous woman had everything, everything to lose.”
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When Roger Bloomstein, another ophthalmologist, ran off with Mr Rice’s wife, he rang his colleague to explain himself and to express the hope that, in time, Mr Rice would come to see it from their point of view and understand. But this pair of esteemed ophthalmologists know that seeing is not the same as understanding.
By the time Friel produced Molly Sweeney, he had established himself as one of Ireland’s great literary dramatists. For him, words are the most important element of theatre and, after more than three decades of skilfully deploying them, he found in Molly Sweeney a metaphor for language and a way of looking at it differently. If the operation is successful, Molly will have to create a new world. “Learning to see is not like learning a new language,” reads Denis Diderot’s introductory quote to the text. “It’s like learning language for the first time.”
The premise behind Molly Sweeney, and the parallels between sight, words and knowledge are exciting, particularly given that Translations — Friel’s greatest commentary on language — is currently playing at the Abbey. However, the text is dense and the internal analogies for Molly’s situation are occasionally too heavy-handed. It is a fine play with a brilliant hypothesis, but difficult to stage and arguably not one of Friel’s best.
Patrick Mason’s production heightens the otherworldly elements of the work. While the three characters speak of events that occurred in the Donegal town of Ballybeg, they are no longer in an identifiableplace; they may not even bein this world. Suspended in a time of regret and restlessness, Byrne in particular creates an unsettling sense of purgatory. He begins his monologues rapidly, which can leave the audience playing catch-up, and delivers them in a Beckettian stream of consciousness that he manages to validate.
Frank, although the most profoundly blind character, lives in ignorance and Hanly engages the audience, almost jumping off stage to join them. Bradfield plays Molly in bare feet, sweeping across the floor and reminding us of her security in the dark. Some movements look too much like newly blind groping, but Bradfield holds Molly’s charm and enchantment throughout.
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Molly starts out as the only happy character and when the others threaten to bring her into an unfamiliar world, she begins to fall apart. Mr Rice’s purgatory is built on his decision to proceed with the operation despite what he knows and regrets from the past. Sight and knowledge are linked but often confused and the guilt-ridden ophthalmologist finally accepts what he knew all along: that the blind woman who might catch a glimpse of our world “understood more than any of us what she did see”.
Molly Sweeney, Gate theatre, Dublin ***