The first act of current Abbey director Tom Murphy's 1984 masterwork, "Bailegangaire" (The Place without Laughter) is somewhat frustrating. There are secrets there, in a lonely house inhabited by an aged grandmother endlessly repeating, but never quite completing, a story seemingly about a laughing contest at Mahoney's pub between one Costello and a stranger named O'Toole accompanied by his wife. Bedbound Mommo, uncannily played by Nancy E. Carroll, is tended by her eldest granddaughter, Mary, played by Natalie Rose Liberace, a nurse who has abandoned her profession. Liberace captures the endless frustration of an unappreciated caregiver. Judith McIntyre plays her slatternly younger sister, Dolly, no holds barred, from her very first entrance in a miniskirt carrying her motorcycle helmet. Difficulties from the past bind these three women to this lonesome place and the endless repetition of Mommo's ornate story, which the younger women know by heart, all except its ending.
It's an end worth waiting for. Carroll captures the ancient magic of the storyteller weaving a spell of remembrance. The author has given her character, Mommo, the poetry of the piece, language used for the joy of it, even when telling of sadness. The well from which Joyce and Beckett drew has been tapped again for this play. The topic of the laughing contest turns out to be "misfortune," which could be a subtitle for the play. Each woman hides a tragedy in her story; each tells it when the time comes.
The structure of the play is not so much episodic as musical, a complex fugue returning to themes heard in passing and not yet understood. The difficulty in presenting such a piece is engaging the audience during the careful groundwork of the play's first half without telegraphing the stunning climaxes of the second. Sugan's artistic director, Carmel O'Reilly, is largely successful in drawing the audience into the shared sorrows of Murphy's characters and their secret torments through careful ensemble work and verbal counterpoint by three actresses with complementary styles. Liberace, as Mary, repressed and too intelligent for her own good, forms the spine of the play in her steady determination to get Mommo to finish the story. That epiphany might release them all to get on with whatever further complications life may bring. McIntyre, as Dolly, caught up in the complications of world of 1984 - an abusive husband working in England most of the year, children, the ongoing strike at the local Japanese car plant, and so on - displays a range of emotions as she stalks about the set, leaving and returning, drawn back to the fray. Carroll, confined to her ancient bed, brings the family's disasters together with her story, barely coherent but gloriously told.
The counterpoint of the action is supported by J. Michael Griggs' simple but eloquent setting; a long narrow representation of a one room slate-floored cottage with Mommo's bed raised slightly at one end. Sepia dye drawings on stained hanging behind her represent pictures from the family's past. An old table with a single hanging light marks the center, a simple kitchen setup against the chimney limits of this meager world. The audience ranked on either side might well be at a tennis match. Sound is the major reminder of the modern world, occasional trucks on the highway and classical music playing on a small radio over the stove. But the peat outside by the outhouse won't last the winter. Sarah Chapman's costumes complete the subtle reality of the show. Again a Sugan production has provided just enough, nothing wasted.
Murphy's plays will probably never be popular, particularly in the today's theatre of shorter and shorter works, with less depth and simplistic solutions. His work is subtle, dense, and difficult to achieve. Indeed, the Abbey in Dublin, which this playwright now heads, rejected his first work thirty years ago as undramatic, not to mention scandalous. But most current writers in the Irish canon acknowledge their debt to Murphy's unflinching look at the current complexity of the fractured Irish soul. His mixture of past and present, storytelling and gritty reality makes him a writer to be cherished; one to be seen when possible. Be prepared to pay attention. This contest is no laughing matter.