Leixlip, County Kildare, Ireland. The year is 2000, the start of a new century – although here is a news story that is almost Medieval. Four women die in a suicide pact. They are 83-year-old Frances Mulhooney and her three nieces, Josephine (46) and the 51-year-old twins Brigid Ruth and Catherine. The women barricade themselves into a house and, over a period of around 40 days, starve themselves to death. The last time any of them were seen in public was when two of the sisters, Catherine and Josephine, went on a shopping trip to St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. Brigid Ruth left letters in the house, expressing doubts about what they were doing.
These are the bare facts. We weren’t there. We don’t know what they said. This is not their story. This is many years later, and here we have Anglo-Irish theatre company Dead Centre finding a way to reflect on the story that tries to bring something to the stage other than journalistic investigation. As Bush Moukarzel (writer/performer/co-director) puts it, we are not here to find the truth, nor to create a sensationalist thriller. We are here to reflect on the bare facts, and to allow our imaginations to run wild. To think about the unthinkable – death – and to know, to really know, that no matter when, no matter what the circumstances, we will all one day face death, alone. Black. No return. Nothing.
Dead Centre theatre company take the bare facts of the case and turn them into an extraordinary theatre piece that, rather than search for meaning, explores meaninglessness and the spaces in between the facts. They describe their piece as a wake – a tribute to the women that honours (rather than explains) their bizarre and unfathomable decision to die in such a terrible way. Although there are no conclusions to be made, there is a strong suggestion that the desire to shake off this mortal coil is sparked by an obsession with Catholic stories of martyrdom, fasting, and the denial of the body’s needs; and driven by a desire to ‘shrug off the overcoat’ of physicality in order to reach heaven as soon as possible. Death, unfortunately, takes its time. In the time it takes them to die, there is an obvious and heartbreaking analogy to Christ’s 40 days in the desert, and the 40 days of Lent. ‘None of us could have foreseen our deaths would be so cruel and slow’ says Brigid Ruth. Which may or may not be something she said in one of her letters.
This is a theatre of design: a collage of fantastic (in both senses of the word) moving pictures; a theatre in which objects take on magical powers. One known fact – that one of the women’s bodies was found in the kitchen, surrounded by bin bags – becomes the source of the central scenographic image of the show: four figures sleepwalking through a landscape of tables, chairs, bags, and scattered paper, crockery, and garbage. I like the onstage division between the ‘real’ world and the Leixlip house. Visual images are powerful, haunting. A back wall is chalked with the outlines of human figures, like ghosts that watch the action. Rain drips then pours in a deluge into a bucket. A china cup is chewed, drawing blood. A leaf-blower blows shredded paper around the stage. A vase smashes: ‘I’ve had enough of dead flowers’ says a sister.
It is also a theatre that uses words in strange and wonderful ways. The role that a lip-reader played in the police investigation is seized on as a motif that permeates the whole show – apparently lip-readers are regularly employed to ‘read’ CCTV footage, and in this case that final shopping outing is scrutinised and deconstructed, the ‘lip-reader’ character then going on to become a kind of intruder-witness to the women’s deaths, mouthing words that they may or may not have said. ‘Wait, it didn’t happen like this, I didn’t say this’ says one of the women. ‘I’m sorry, I was only trying to help’ says the lip-reader. One whole long section of a filmed close-up of lips has echoes of Beckett’s Not I. Brigid Ruth’s letters – presented verbatim, possibly, are texts that both enlighten and add further mystery. Some are poetic: ‘I believe we all of us, every single soul, has a karmic debt to pay off (me included)’ and some are prosaic: ‘Let’s think of exiting ourselves humanely…save ourselves a slow and painful hell.’
And this is a theatre in which sound design is not merely decorative, it is integral to the dramaturgy of the piece. As the four women and the lip-reader negotiate their way through the terrible green-lit dreamscape kitchen, a deep throbbing bass sound, deep enough to be felt in the stomach, shakes the room. ‘Found sound’ includes country music classic Home is Where You’re Happy and Elvis Presley’s Crying in the Chapel. Played straight, slowed down, sung along to. Sound designer Adam Welsh is a co-founder of the company, and appears onstage playing ‘Adam the Technician’.
The third core member of Dead Centre is c0-director Ben Kidd – who must have had his work cut out for him balancing so many disparate elements – text, physical action, visual imagery, sound –a job he has done very well for the most part. The show also credits ‘cameo writer’ Mark O’Halloran, an established screenwriter – and indeed it is a very filmic piece of theatre.
There are some criticisms: occasionally the piece is tripped up by its postmodern meta-theatre elements. I dislike the beginning – a mock post-show discussion. I understand the need to find a way theatrically to present the facts of the case before we spin off into the world of the four women, but this set-up for me doesn’t work well. I do, though, enjoy the performative ‘interval’ where, in place of a real interval, we are treated to a minute or two of the lip-reader ‘relaxing’.
Formed in 2012 in Dublin, Dead Centre are on their third production. They come to Scotland with a raft of accolades from the Dublin Fringe, where Lippy premiered in 2013. It is unusual to come across work this ambitious from young companies based in the UK or Ireland – an exceptional piece, despite some flaws.
Lippy is shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award 2014 for Innovation & Experimentation.