The Loved Ones: Decrypting signs from the dead
A grieving mother learns her dead son had an affair, in Erica Murray’s excellent drama.
Gate Theatre, Dublin Theatre Festival
★★★★☆
“My son would not have done something like this,” says Nell, face-to-face with a surprise visitor at her home deep in the Clare wilderness. The fact she is learning six months after her son Robin’s death that he had an affair with one of his college students – now pregnant with their child – and, yet, is calmly oblique and questioning, might be chalked up to her scepticism, her family loyalty, and the exceptionally smooth control of Jane Brennan.
In Erica Murray’s excellent play for Rough Magic and the Gate Theatre, Brennan is the calm, unknowable anchor – much like her stealthily brilliant performance in 2019’s The Beacon. After coming around to believing the impulsive pregnant Londoner Gabby (an absorbing Eavan Gaffney, a late addition to the evening’s cast), Nell has a house to keep in order: an immensely curious Airbnb guest from America (Helen Norton); her irritable daughter-in-law Orla (Grainne Keenan), arriving any moment to help scatter Robin’s ashes, unaware of his infidelity before he died.