Once Before I Go review: The touching act of honouring a dying man’s wish
Phillip McMahon’s heartfelt play goes back in time to uncover what happened to a fallen friend. Photo: Ros Kavanagh
Gate Theatre, Dublin Theatre Festival
★ ★ ★
“I think you’re here to drag skeletons,” says someone, with suspicion, early in the Gate Theatre’s new play Once Before I Go. Only moments later does Lynn, a hard-edged woman played by Aisling O’Sullivan, arrived at the London home of a friend she hasn’t seen in 25 years, produce an urn holding the ashes of her dead brother Bernard. Questions about the past have gone unanswered.
Lynn walked in looking for Daithí, a close friend from their time living in Dublin in the late ‘80s, but instead finds Jase, a young trans man living in Daithí’s care while recovering from addiction and struggling for his family’s acceptance. Hurt and defensive in Sam Crerar’s spiky performance, Jase nudges with empty slogans (“The war is life and the fight is to survive,” he says, with a wink) while Lynn and Daithí discreetly acknowledge the horrors of a previous era.
That’s not to say Phillip McMahon’s heartfelt script cannot weave such ironies into disarming connections. When Jase asks Lynn, in a moment of feeling lost, “Ever feel like you don’t know where you’re meant to be?”, O’Sullivan exhales into a definitive “Yes,” as if acquainted with a lifetime of rejection. There’s hope for solidarity, the play seems to suggest, but first the past must be put to rest. Pressed by Lynn for an explanation as to why he didn’t attend Bernard’s funeral, Daithí, gently played by an excellent Sean Campion, tearfully remembers the love of his life.
In performance, O’Sullivan and Campion touchingly bear the weight of a hidden history, looking nostalgically upon irrepressible younger versions of themselves as director Selina Cartmell’s bright, uplifting production moves into a ‘80s Dublin flat, against the exhilarating EDM of “Never Can Say Goodbye”. A community, overshadowed by a desperate struggle with the AIDS crisis, is given the exuberance it’s due.
Here, younger versions of Lynn and Daithí (Martha Breen and Desmond Eastwood) discuss the progress of LGBTQ+ activism while preparing to attend a meeting at the Hirschfeld Centre, when in arrives Bernard (a sharp Matthew Malone), still bloody from getting kicked out by his parents but eager to embrace life. Where the first act of McMahon’s script feeds us exposition via well-crafted zingers (“You see the line,” says Daithí, describing a downward spiral of grief and drugs, “You just don’t know whether to cross it or snort it.”), here the plot points are communicated more broadly. Lynn seems to speak via bumper-sticker wisdom (“Get angry and stay angry,” she says, in a call to arms) while her desperate need to escape from Ireland, where her personal life has been taken over by the cause, feels undiscovered.
There is something more tantalising in the romantic pairing of Eastwood’s top-button, intellectual Daithí and Malone’s effervescently pure Bernard - a classic formula throughout the eons, from double-acts such as Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, but given queer and contemporary shape here. As the plot moves into the late-night splendour of the lovers’ Paris apartment, Daithí’s judgemental pragmatism is seen to have melted into a caring practicality: “Will I wash you?” he asks, bathing Bernard’s lesioned body while both discuss the banal developments of a French-language class. Though they don’t mention the virus tearing apart their lives, the scene quietly aches for our sympathy.
Bernard may sum up his pride and gratitude near the end of his life in loudspeaker-big declarations that pull the scene from its intimacy, as if aiming for the ears of a wider audience, but there is still something moving in the play’s final moments. Making as much dazzling reference to Stephen Sondheim’s Follies as to queer archivist Tony Walsh’s portal-opening memorabilia, a glass gets raised in paradise, honouring a dying man’s wish.
Runs until 30th October.