You’re Still Here review: Conversations that change lives forever
Three siblings come face-to-face about their inherited home in Murmuration's new installation-play.
Dublin Castle - Outside the Printworks, Dublin Fringe Festival
★ ★ ★
Early in You’re Still Here, the new play by Murmuration, a woman forever guessing the thoughts of her tough-minded sister reaches a point of frustration. “What is going on inside your head?” she says.
The irony of the question will not be lost on those attendant to the company’s previous outings. The achievement of Murmuration’s plays, directed by John King with story concepts by playwright James Elliott, has been their touching snapshots of miscommunication. Half-heard comments are discovered to have corkscrewed into wounding pieces of shrapnel, making people close to each other drift sadly apart. Borrowing as much from installation art as from theatre, the plays put headphones on their audiences, allowing characters’ guarded conversation (which is pre-recorded) to dance nervously alongside their withheld thoughts (spoken from the actors’ mouths). People literally speak what’s on their mind, inside dramas where they can’t.
In those previous plays, the reunions between separated individuals saw an admirable willingness not to stack the decks, to allow each argument a counter-argument. You’re Still Here is less balanced, that a character crying “What’s going on inside your head?” sounds more like the voice of the creators wrestling with their formula.
From under a canopy in a city square, the minutiae of the script, written by King and Finbarr Doyle with the company, imagines someplace else: a house under constant refurbishment, on a quiet road occasionally interrupted by soothing flashes of cars. Sam (Hazel Clifford) is so preoccupied with renovating the inherited home, her sister Niamh (Eavan Gaffney) cannot help but take it personally as traces of their childhood get painted over. Why so eager to erase the past?
That question feels freighted throughout, with suggestions of something unresolved about the women’s dead father, but it also resists explanation. Where in Murmuration’s previous dramas an overheard comment or confused phone-call would be seen undergoing agonising somersaults into misinterpretations, no aimed communication has been taken up wrongly in You’re Still Here. Sam and Niamh sit routinely on their living room couch, evading each other’s questioning while secretly yearning to lift the stillness enveloping their lives, and you realise this is just a family who don’t express what they really feel. Period.
A more dire, entrenched silence surrounds the sisters’ absent brother Jack, who sends word that he is visiting the family home for the first time in years. With Finbarr Doyle’s calmly horrified voice, he steps inside the unrecognisable house and feels disconnected. “What should I say?” he thinks. “Thank you for letting me stay? To crash? To come home”?
The sisters’ feelings of betrayal towards Jack may become simplified, without excavating more contradicting emotions, but there is something touching in the aesthetics of Murmuration’s approach as the siblings finally have their face-to-face. Jennifer O’Malley’s painstaking sound design reverses the polarity: the characters suddenly begin speaking their words, their thoughts transmitted through recording. An audience no longer needs to eavesdrop.
Clifford, Gaffney and Doyle give one of the most touching group efforts of the year, their careful voices just above whispering, as if carrying the weight of a conversation that can change lives forever. There are no disruptions, no messy complications. Here, finally, is an opportunity to connect.
Runs until 26th September.