“Cá bhfuil Grace?” Well, that’s pretty clear in Enda Walsh’s latest work for the Abbey Theatre, this one on the Peacock stage.
The director and writer of this song cycle refers to it as a “period piece” and that period is literally stamped on Katie Davenport’s set: Barna, Galway, in the 1990s.
The question of where her head is at, however, is more complicated, and it’s the journey that Walsh takes us on: delving into her ruined childhood, her present destitution, the misuse and abuse that have marked her sad and lonely life.
All that might sound rather grim, but Kate Gilmore gives Grace such spirit, energy and defiance as to carry us along through a series of vignettes, combining lyrics, video, music and sound to by turns beautiful or brutal effect.
Grace is a woman messed up by her parents, her past, her life.
We find her first before a lichen-mottled wall of grey on grey, the outlines of two goals evoking perhaps a Sean Scully artwork, or a handball alley – if perhaps one used more for “pucking ball”, as they say.
In front, stacked portable TVs play old Eurovision footage, or Kylie and Jason’s wedding from Neighbours. A fridge lying open on its side looks like some futuristic sleeping pod.
There’s plastic furniture where Grace will sit and dull things with slugs of Satzenbrau, or wine wrung from a bag.
This space is transformed by Jack Phelan’s stunning video projections, which illustrate Grace’s memories, or the worlds she creates in her imagination. Worlds in which she suffers, but also hopes, and copes. It’s technically brilliant.
There are exquisite moments in this, such as when Grace follows a narrow strip of sunlight as it moves up that grey wall, climbing to meet it so her face, lit up, seems almost like a doll’s as she sings.
The light then stretches away back down the stage, becoming liquid as it does: the handball alley a seawall now, the water lapping along to a slow, piano-accompanied song of the sea.
At other times, it’s almost harrowing: a distorted, strobe-lit expression of torment. The lyrics can be hard to discern in this, but what they express is never unclear.
Keeping with the period setting, composer Anna Mullarkey’s music harnesses the sounds of 1990s dance music, think Orbital, say, or Faithless, without ever seeming dated, or cliched or derivative. Quite a feat.
A remembered birthday party has a terrible flavour of the time too. First, there’s a David Lynchian oddness in the staring children in pointy hats, the smoking nonplussed adults.
Then it mixes in Grace’s imagination with a dancing funeral to become like a particularly unhinged Aphex Twin video.
Yet Grace’s character is never eclipsed by all this. In a disarming scene, she leaves the stage completely, and all its technical wonders.
She stands next to us, unadorned, just herself, warm and alive and vulnerable as she sings quietly about love.
It’s a touching moment and underscores the achievement of Walsh and the team here: to create something so technically impressive, while never letting that overshadow a simple, affecting human story.
