Eleanora Salter and the Monster from the Sea review: The comedy of sinking
Jane Madden and Clodagh Mooney Duggan’s comedy is a complex navigation of grief. Photo: Simon Lazewski
Bewley’s Café Theatre, Dublin Fringe Festival
★ ★ ★ ★
Alone in a remote lighthouse, with only voices from a wireless to keep her company, Eleanora does what can only be expected. She grabs the receiver and imagines herself as a maniacally-charged radio personality.
“This is Eleanora Salter, salty after all those tears,” she zings, to an audience of no one. The woeful introduction makes the lighthouse keeper recoil. She had tried to take personal misery and wear it like a brand, only for it to fall flat. Such is the innovation of Jane Madden and Clodagh Mooney Duggan’s play, to put an unhappy character in plain sight only for any obvious attempt to process their suffering to be round-housed by jokes. It’s as if the boundaries of comedy are being redrawn to deal with something abstract.
Eleanora has been appointed to the same station once operated by her recently dead father. Soon after arriving, she tests the radio and introduces herself to the other lighthouse keepers. What follows is the funereal dread of sharing the grim news, of awkward attempts to lighten the subject, and listening to excruciating eulogies barely summing up the deceased. Mooney Duggan’s performance nails every clenched smile, every agonised eye roll.
While Eleanora manages the lighthouse, a transistor radio brings forth the arguing, diehard voices of news programmes and the overdone enunciations of interviewers. After a number of poltergeist-like disruptions, one mysterious broadcaster begins speaking directly to Eleanora, revealing that they are a monster living under the sea. Surprisingly, both get affectionately close.
The plot’s cacophony rides on the detail of Cameron Macauley’s meticulous sound design, woven from enjoyable contributions by an extended cast of voice actors, but it also puts specific demands on director Katie O’Halloran’s production. There’s a lot of Eleanora either failing to recognise the weird goings-on or being freaked out by them, sequences of mostly non-verbal, physical exaggeration belonging more to a dumbshow.
This isn’t a dive into escapism. There’s always been a touch of half-glass reality to Madden’s plays. Her previous comedies The Windstealers and Birdy took place in worlds already gone belly-up, where corruption and oppression were writ large with little sign of overturning the established order. In Eleanora and the Monster from the Sea, the lighthouse sits on the edge of somewhere that has sunk into economic ruin.
If those previous plays showed Madden as impressively adept at classic comedy rhythms, there’s a nudge here towards a modern genre. The charm of the script is how it makes unfunny subjects – unfunny people, specifically - fun to watch. Eleanora constantly makes poorly-constructed analogies and ambiguous statements which then corkscrew farce-like into incoherence, drifting further and further away from the point. “You could say I was lost at sea,” she says, trying to sound sagacious about her life. These are the spectacular anvil-thuds of cringe comedy.
It feels significant that Eleanora grows close to the monster, and makes declarations of platonic love, all in the wake of a personal tragedy. In one disarming moment, the monster tells an old family joke and momentarily slips in the voice of Eleanora’s father, startling her. This new relationship has everything to do with the past.
What at first doesn’t seem obvious becomes a rather complex navigation of grief. It dawns on Eleanora that she and the monster are being pulled apart by different priorities, after having dearly comforted one another during a difficult time. She squares the relationship as an unhealthy attachment. When someone gets trapped down a hole, it’s easy to fall head over feet at whoever extends the first helping hand.
There is a lot of fun, Madden knows, in watching things sink rock bottom. But there’s also joy in the fresh inhalation of returning to the surface, to new perspectives gained. You first had to taste the saltwater.
Run ended.
Friends, in other news:
I interviewed Phillip McMahon (‘The country has yet to come to terms with its Aids crisis’) for the Irish Times ahead of the opening of Once Before I Go.
- Chris