IN Kitchensink, Paul Mercier returns to the theme of people and places moving through time. His setting here is a half built house, bare concrete walls and gaping holes for windows and doors, in an estate on the edge of a city. As time passes, the house/estate moves up the hill, becoming more expensive and obliterating a nostalgic past "with urban ugliness.
First into the raw building are two children playing rebel games, soon replaced by teenagers restless at home, wanting to escape into an adult world. Next come the newly weds, avid for the life ahead. Masks are used as each couple makes an entrance, a device which suggests a continuity in the different characters and which finally closes the circle of two generations.
Even the early scenes are infused with a sense of cynicism, a knowledge of the disillusion ahead. The first settled couple manifest a united front for the neighbours, a growing bitterness inside. He is on the brink of a collapsing enterprise; she has a feeling of being displaced - in a suburb of the mind. Later a drunken husband, after a bitter quarrel with his wife, ends up with an old night watchman. He directs a diatribe at all the things that reduce him to a nonentity, and it is comprehensive.
The cycle continues as one generation displaces another, adding to the urban sprawl and the accumulation of ambition for more of the same. A linkage in names and events squares a sprawling circle, containing a cry of impassioned protest against the destruction of a physical and mental environment. David Gorry, Deirdre Molloy, Cathy Belton and Liam Carney fill their multiple roles with total conviction.
This is not an all embracing view of life. Paul Mercier has looked through a single window, and seen with rage an ugliness imposed by forces of ignorance and greed. His individual characters, framed in telling snapshots, cannot engage us as complete people, but they are recognisably real and, telling creations. This is one of the most ambitious Irish plays of recent years, perhaps a scene or two too far, maybe needing the objectivity of a director other than the author. ,But it has lodged in my mind in a way that transcends routine criticism; I'm still thinking about it.
