Where Sat the Lovers review: An excellent, compassionate drama flips open a conspiracy theory
Even Isaac Newton appears in this play about someone who is distrustful of public institutions. Photo: Simon Lazewski
Project Arts Centre - Space Upstairs, Dublin Fringe Festival
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
At the beginning of Malaprop’s new play Where Sat the Lovers, as two strangers are hooking-up inside a Belfast apartment, the conversation moves onto the hot topic of Nazi concentration camps.
When the apartment’s resident (Bláithín MacGabhann) explains that a photograph in the living room depicts the interior of a gas chamber, the woman (a razor-sharp Juliette Crosbie) points out that the chamber is likely a reconstruction. The real camps were destroyed. A simulation could easily be mistaken for the real thing.
While debating the factuality of such claims, sparks still fly between the couple, as the unnamed resident (who goes by they/them pronouns throughout), an aspiring composer, gives a nervous tour of their research projects including an investigation into the suspicious destruction of a RUC archive in Antrim. “I am not a lizard person,” they insist.
In this age of misinformation, where people can be persuaded more easily by sinister motives than proven facts, how do we respond? For a company as well-researched as Malaprop (their 2017 hit Everything Not Saved was haunted by the story of Maria Rasputin, daughter of Grigori Rasputin, no less), the answer seems to lie with 17th century mathematics.
If Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation is based on observations which are synthesised into a probable conclusion, what separates that law from a misinformation campaign, or so the physicist himself teases. In the impressive bravura of Wren Dennehy, who leans into the historical figure’s homosexuality, Isaac watches from the edge as a crooning MC, persuading the audience to sing lyrics that sound like conspiracy theories. Everyone is suddenly gullible.
It’s an extraordinary achievement of director Claire O’Reilly and set designer Molly O’Cathain that the supple production can blaze up with otherworldly effects and still settle into an intimate apartment where John Gunning’s lighting may artfully cast shadows reminding of the neatness of geometry, but emotions are far more complex. Recovering from bad treatment received for a mental health episode, MacGabhainn’s character is distrustful of a list of institutions, from the health service to the police. Their sister (Maeve O’Mahony), full of concern, tries to persuade them to go back to medical care, convinced that her sibling’s illness is genetically linked to both of their parents’ depressions.
That makes for one hell of an impasse, one not without its touching retreats. As she sees her sibling deepen into a panic attack, O’Mahony’s sister kindly reaches out, asking them about their music compositions. In an excellent performance, MacGabhainn shows the character constantly stung by flashes of trauma, not always reachable but always yearning for relief.
In the most riveting, understated script yet to be written by Dylan Coburn Gray with the company, the play suggests that the mind-warp of a conspiracy theory may, in fact, be someone’s intense pain going unobserved. In an immensely compassionate finale, Malaprop allows that shift in thought to take place, lifting all burdens. As a result, happiness falls naturally, like gravity.
Run ended.