Murphy delivers a fraught drama about three people on the edge of society in a play that plunges the depths of humanity in its ‘unhoused, free condition’ and yet retains a warm sense of humour. Harry is an outcast and shadow of his former powerful self; an itinerant ex-circus strongman, he is hired by the Monsignor of a Catholic church to act as caretaker. He only lasts one shift but it is an eventful night in which he is visited by a ghostlike waif, Maudie, and his nemesis, the Irish blackguard Francisco. These three, battered and bruised by life’s onslaught, entertain and protect each other in ways that are by turns nurturing and beastly, but in every way all too human.
The dingy church setting is realistically rendered with pews, a pulpit, a confessional and the sanctuary lamp but the echoing effect that persists throughout the play is an unnecessary distraction. The very dominance of the church-as-set is ironic because of the very fact that religious faith doesn’t feature as a strong redemptive force (the church echoes because it is an empty signifier); Harry speaks to the sanctuary lamp, remembering his young daughter and lamenting her loss, but he can derive no comfort from it or from the notion of God. Only Maudie maintains her belief in Jesus and his powers of forgiveness because of the extremity in which she finds herself and the guilt she suffers over the death of her child. Francisco is a bombastic drunk but also a plain-speaker who goes someway towards convincing Maudie that the ghostly visitations she believes she has experienced are mere dreams.
Robert O’Mahoney gives an excellent and warm performance as Harry. By way of his compulsion to talk and his antic verbal expression, where he tirelessly appends almost every utterance with a ‘you know’ or an ‘actually’, he counters loneliness by filling emptiness with words - after all “silence is loneliness” in this play. His eccentricity is humorous but also pitiful as his verbal tics reveal that something about his character is amiss. He mentions to the Monsignor that he has a compulsion to do something bad, this ‘something’ remains unnamed but it lends a sinister air to the proceedings, especially when the young and vulnerable Maudie shows up.
Kate Brennan’s Maudie is a strange creature who fetishises the telling of her own story by hinting at the sexual violence in her past and then excitedly asking ‘shall I tell you…?’ when Harry or Francisco provides an audience. Unlike Harry, Francisco is willing to listen to Maudie’s story which serves to demystify it just as his atheistic rant deflates the Mystery of religion – “God made the world, sure. But what has he done since?” Declan Conlon gives an energetic performance as Francisco and manages to capture his Irish charm as well as his disturbing sexual interest in Maudie. This play shows how the religious morality cannot serve as a template for life with all its complexity and nuance. Maudie is young and her religious conviction strong, on the other hand Francisco and Harry display the cynicism that comes with experience. It is obvious that Maudie will lose her spirituality and become a pragmatist – religion has no place where humanity exists in all its imperfection. Murphy’s play is unintentionally all too timely - Harry’s question “is the Pope infallible?” is distressingly resonant at the present time as sexual abuse in the Irish Catholic church is once again making the headlines.
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