GERALD MURPHY’S play begins with a sour-faced man, dressed as a security guard, sitting at his home computer with a roll of loo paper beside him. I don’t think I’m giving too much away when I tell you that it ends in exactly the same way. But by then we know that Joe Hanley’s Bren has a weakness for young girls and young girls’ underwear and we have a pretty good idea of what he’s about to download. He’s trapped with his lonely obsessions, locked in his private perversities, and nothing is going to change.
So what happens between those two unsettling moments? Not a lot or, rather, barely enough to justify the play’s transfer from Dublin, the city in which it is set and had its premiere a year ago. Bren’s stark, loveless flat is the place where his birth family — he is, as people knowingly point out, not yet married — proceeds to do what every variety of family tends to do in modern drama. It more or less fragments.
To Bren’s undisguised dismay, his father has chosen his flat for a family conference at which he’ll give his sons the latest news about their mother, who has, it seems, been taken to hospital. This explains the arrival of Bren’s two brothers: Aidan Kelly’s Andy, a restless, noisy, envious, pushy man for- ever trying to wheedle out information about other people’s incomes and sex lives, and Barry Ward’s Kev, who is quieter and more successful, since he’s a graduate and has landed a good job in computers.
Except that Kev isn’t and hasn’t. This is one of those plays in which hidden truths come into the open, rugs get pulled from under feet, and claims are exposed as lies. Again, I don’t think I’m trading state secrets when I reveal that neither Kev’s job nor Andy’s marriage are what they are supposed be. Nor is Vincent McCabe’s Da, who strides on stage looking more bullish and confident than he is, being candid about Ma and Ma’s predicament. Where is she and why? You don’t have to be a specialist in family plays to twig that the poor woman isn’t likely to be forlornly waiting for her loving husband and sons to turn up at some bed of pain with flowers and tangerines.
But do we care very much? As one would expect of a production directed by Lynne Parker and produced by her Rough Magic company, all four actors give strong, sure performances. They don’t, however, convince us that the stakes are particularly high or that we’re watching people whose problems matter a lot.
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Families in modern drama need not fragment bombastically. But they can, I know, fragment more excitingly.
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