A potty-mouthed harridan who will pick a fight with anyone
Happy days are here again for Eileen in Karis Kelly's new play, set in a contemporary Northern Ireland simmering with recent history. Eileen is celebrating her 90th birthday, and all four generations of the family she sired will be gathering around the kitchen table to celebrate.
Or at least the women will, anyway. There's Eileen's own daughter Jenny, who keeps house and pretty much everything besides as she hoards up the past. Then there's Jenny's daughter Gilly, who's just arrived from London with her teenage offspring Muireann, who rejects her Irish name, and has no sense of history before five minutes ago.
Whether Eileen has always been a potty-mouthed harridan who will pick a fight with anyone or whether it's come with age isn't clear. Either way, it sets the tone for a vicious four-way sparring in the first half of the play as the women reacquaint themselves with unsettled scores while they prepare the birthday dinner.
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Julia Dearden plays Eileen with an unfiltered ferocity that suggests she knows where the bodies are buried. Andrea Irvine's Gilly is a classic Irish matriarch, but she too has a volatility about her when challenged by outside forces. Caoimhe Farren's Jenny may have escaped her geographical confines, but exile brings its own problems, as Muireann Ní Fhaogáin captures the juvenile idealism of 14-year-old Muireann,
What initially appears to be a scabrous domestic battlefield steeped in hand-me-down resentment as the sins of the mothers come to the surface is entertaining enough in Katie Posner's production, a collaboration between Paines Plough, Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Sheffield Theatres and Women's Prize for Playwriting in association with Lyric Theatre Belfast.
As tempers fray on Lily Arnold's classic kitchen set, the truth of the absence of the men in the family leads to a dramatic and stylistic explosion. The play's shattering conclusion unearths everything beyond with seismic results in a daring evocation of the psychological damage that lingers from the barely suppressed history of the Troubles continues to leave its mark.
Until August 24, various times
For festival tickets see here
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