The Stage

The Alice Trilogy

Published Thursday 17 November 2005 at 14:55 by Alistair Smith

Somewhere in between Beckett, Joyce and Kate Chopin, Murphy’s play tells the unfolding tryptic of Alice, a disillusioned Irish lady, as she progresses through a life of missed opportunities and mundane drudgery.

The central figure, played quite mesmerisingly by Juliet Stevenson, is shown in three stages of her life over a quarter century, as she progresses from despairing young housewife with a whisky bottle to embittered old lady with a glass of wine.

In between resides the production’s highlight, the second part of the trilogy, which sees Alice rendezvous with her old flame Jimmy, played by Stanley Townsend, only for the encounter to go wrong.

The other two sections of the play take place almost entirely within Alice’s own head and lack the dynamism of this meeting. The first is a conversation with her alter ego and the second an internal monologue as she sits opposite her dour husband eating in an airport lounge, waiting for her dead son’s body to be loaded on to a plane.

While the production, and indeed Stevenson’s performance, wonderfully capture the despair and isolation endured by a woman who has found herself constricted by society, her inner life is not as captivating as a Bloom and the godless isolation of her world not as engrossing as that created by Beckett.

Indeed, the third part of the trilogy really fails to hold your attention, or in fact, explain what point Tom Murphy is trying to make. Having said that, Ian Rickson’s direction is superb and much of the staging fabulous - but one can’t help but think that the play rests somewhat fragilely upon Stevenson’s powerful central performance.