The Saviour review: More heavy-handed than innovative

Deirdre Kinahan's new play, centring on a Magdalene survivor, asks interesting questions about forgiveness. Photo: Jed Niezgoda

Cork Midsummer Festival

★ ★

Set your eyes on Máire, the silver-haired woman in Landmark Productions’ streamed play The Saviour, and you might get the feeling of déjà vu. Telling a meticulous story while sitting upright in bed, in the familiarly arresting form of Marie Mullen, she resembles something of the senile grandmother in Tom Murphy’s masterpiece Bailegangaire – one of Irish theatre’s greatest fictional characters.

To put Mullen in such surroundings, playing an entrancingly loquacious role, could be a piece of casting verging on piracy. (The actor’s extraordinary performance in Bailegangaire has been a career highlight). Instead, as Máire sits gaily against the headboard, waiting for a lover who is cooking breakfast downstairs, and recounts the intimacy between them with a liberating physicality, Deirdre Kinahan’s script seems drawn towards another woman often seen in bed. This has the ring of the vivacious pleasures of Molly Bloom.

In a drama about religious hypocrisy, the transcendent sexuality of James Joyce’s creation could be a conductive lightning rod. Among the details we hear of Máire’s life - a struggle with grief after the death of her husband; an unhappy separation from her children – is the sad discovery that she is the survivor of a Magdalene laundry. (“I almost forgot my name. In Stanhope Street, we went by numbers,” she says). Seen now, blissfully smoking a cigarette in bed while waiting for a lover to return, might seem a subversion of past trauma and control of women’s lives, except she is having a fully serious and out-loud conversation with Jesus, her “first” lover.

“You’ll always be my first,” says Máire with cute assurance, coaxing the invisible son of God as if he were an easily jealous ex-boyfriend. It’s difficult to know how to take the occasional flickers of girlishness in Mullen’s performance, in a play where a 67-year-old woman seems child enough to have her son Mel (Brian Gleeson) show up and gift her a doll for her birthday.

In reconciling her faith with the church as a broken institution, Máire prays to a “Jesus that loves. A Jesus that forgives.” Forgiveness, the play makes clear, can be dangerously mistaken for absolution, and when Mel passes on concerning news to Máire about her lover, it seems that with some Catholic forgiveness the crimes of a man, no less than a church, can be recklessly erased.

That’s an interesting sanctimony to reckon with in this post-Catholic era. The overall effect, however, is more heavy-handed than innovative. As mother and son spar over the revelation about Máire’s lover, their standoff sometimes sputters in incomplete sentences, giving director Louise Lowe’s camera work a restless flow. (“Just spit it out!” says Máire). The bitterness between characters splits down old-school divisions, socially and politically, resulting in a shouting match barraging the “sins” of gay sex and the purity of Catholic confession, not unlike a squawky panel debate on a current affairs programme.

While undoubtedly compassionate to the mind-warping effects of the Magdalene laundry, the play gives a bleaker portrayal of survival, leaving Máire to sink back into her nightmares. Who knows how she will be saved.

Runs until 27th June.