Grace: A ghost story that’s touchingly believable
A nonspeaking autistic girl meets the ghost of her dead father, in Jody O’Neill’s poignant play.
Graffiti Theatre, Cork Midsummer Festival
★★★★☆
On a few occasions throughout Grace, Graffiti and Once Off Productions’s new play for young audiences, a character kindly asks us to accept what we’re seeing, as if it were something founded on not much proof. “Would you believe it?” says a man, with warmth, in Bryan Burroughs’s fine performance. Indeed, the play seems to be asking us to suspend our disbelief, to embrace the supernatural. (“If I told you I wasn’t living, would you believe me?” he says).
The play may ask us to accept the man to be a ghost, and may usher us into the otherworldly, but there is something else in that question, written by Jody O’Neill, the playwright of the box-office sensation What I (Don’t) Know About Autism. In a drama about young neurodiverse people and their families, it sounds like a dignified invitation by a community who don’t often feel seen, wondering what would happen if they revealed themselves: “Would you believe it”?