Audrey or Sorrow: Marina Carr’s play is kind of a mess
In Carr's return to absurdist theatre, a group of ghosts observe a young couple.
Abbey Theatre - Abbey Stage, Dublin
★★☆☆☆
“Is she dead or isn’t she?” says someone, seeking clarity at one point in Landmark Productions and the Abbey Theatre’s zigzagging new play. By this point, in a house inhabited unexplainedly by ghosts, the eponymous Audrey, after being brutally attacked by her fellow spirits, and guilted into making a vague apology to them, has just been rescued from being trapped inside the kitchen fridge, looking frozen and battered. Is this a carefully teased mystery or a random sequence of events?
In her return to absurdist theatre for the first time since 1991’s Ullaloo, playwright Marina Carr presents a puzzle that seems too oblique to map clearly. From the opening scene, there’s a lot to process: two adult ghosts dressed in brightly coloured tutus are mid-conversation, having a children’s tea party, and talking matter-of-factly about the tooth fairy. If you listen closely, you can pick up hints to a dependent relationship. “I can’t leave her,” admits Grass, a nervously agreeable phantom played by Marie Mullen. “I was trying to make you feel necessary,” says Mac, indulging her, in a performance by Anna Healy that takes seemingly throwaway lines, and somehow makes them land.