The Visiting Hour review: Clever retrieval of family history from the fog of dementia

In the Gate Theatre's absorbing streamed play, a man in a nursing home exchanges wild recollections with his daughter. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

★ ★ ★ ★

At first sight, the nursing home resident staring blankly out his window in the Gate Theatre’s streamed play The Visiting Hour is slightly strange. The sombre face of Stephen Rea is obscured by long wavy hair, a tuxedo and ruffle shirt positioning him in an entirely different time and place, like a man waywardly pieced together.

Frank McGuinness’s absorbing new drama is similarly changeable, exchanging recollections between the man and his visiting daughter. From a bench outside his window, she sits, flickering between patience and amusement in Judith Roddy’s sharp performance, while they sift through memories that are vague and wild. He recounts his success as a professional singer once ascendant to the final of the Eurovision, cheated of victory by schemes in the music industry. She, watching her father drift under the fog of dementia, is desperate for him to recognise her.

In the past, McGuinness has put a lot of energy into being an old soul - crafting Chekhovian family sagas in Donegal and The Hanging Garden, or mining the vengeance of Greek tragedy in The Match Box - but the clever slipperiness of The Visiting Hour brings to mind more contemporary influences, most obviously Florian Zeller’s The Father. Illusions and disguises can shift like folds in the mind. The Gate Theatre’s long unvisited auditorium may be serving a dazzling comeback, its chandeliers and colonnades made more resplendent than before by Paul Keogan’s lighting, but those details also evoke music ballrooms from the man’s fantasies.

For Roddy’s woman, there is a begrudging want for closure, a frustration with the gaps in his memory. The windowpane separating them allows director Caitríona McLaughlin to project the listener’s reflection against the speaker, to bring both parties into view as they advance and retreat. This family’s wreckage, McGuinness cleverly recognises, cannot be lucidly retrieved, only outlined through strange fictions told. “Then one day, you were gone, and my dreams all came tumbling down,” sings the daughter, in their exchange of Eurovision classics, hinting at a sad history of abandonment.

Most successful, and compassionate, is the play’s decision to not try shatter the illusions of dementia but to wade through them, as a place where daughter and father can meaningfully meet. At times, McGuinness seems to take this as an excuse to be implausibly extravagant with dialogue. “Why am I in this kip?” asks the father. “This midden,” she piles on. “This mire,” he adds further.

We get it.

Less showy and more fascinating is when the daughter, watching her father edge closer towards a cache of painful memories, decides to join him in his tall tales. Here, she’s able to give an otherworldly but kinder version of real events. It’s a touching gesture that sadly vanishes by the end of the visiting hour, unable to stay.

Runs until 24th April.