Lucy Caldwell’s first play, winner of the George Devine Award in 2006, is a study of a family paralysed by crisis, whose earnestness and power goes far to compensate for a beginner’s inevitable imperfections in structure and characterisation.
A seemingly happy Belfast family is shaken by the eldest daughter’s attempted suicide while away at university and Caldwell’s best insight is that the others are not actually altered by the shock, but rather retreat into more extreme versions of what they had always been like.
Father immerses himself in his work, mother struggles to keep things seeming normal, one daughter becomes an even brattier teenager than usual and the other regresses into childlike optimism. Only the eldest daughter has changed, her depression legitimately presented as fact without being glibly explained away.
The play offers no way out for these characters, but does find its way to an understanding of their paralysis, finally voiced by the youngest daughter. Since everything had seemed normal before the suicide attempt, they will never be able to trust feelings of normality again.
The play’s biggest weakness is that, with the characters all absorbed in their own pain, they take turns seeming egocentric and unsympathetic to the others, leaving the audience no one to empathise with. Half-hearted attempts to relate things to the traumas inherent in living in Belfast go nowhere and the revelation of the suicide attempt and the eventual appearance of the eldest daughter are delayed so long that there has to be an element of anticlimax, forcing the play to recover from an early sense that the family are over-reacting.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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