The Saviour review: A showcase for Marie Mullen’s room-filling stagecraft

The Saviour

Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire

★★★★☆

Arriving at Dublin Theatre Festival after a stage premiere in New York, Deirdre Kinahan’s fine two-hander groans with dramatic commentary on where the nation has been and where it has ended up. The room-filling Marie Mullen, alternately operatic and balletic, plays the sort of Mother Ireland we expect to emerge as a heroine.

To an extent, Máire, her character, delivers on that expectation. The informal opening act constitutes a monologue, delivered to a personal Jesus (as much imaginary friend as deity) that reveals a too-familiar litany of postcolonial catastrophes. She was sent to a Magdalene laundry after the death of her mother. She managed to find a decent man who took her away to the blue skies of Cincinnati. They came home – “why?” she wonders – to a country still shrouded in grey. We meet her in her bedroom, a widow swathed in a pink robe, as she teases Jesus with a postcoital celebration of a lover who has just left the house.

Mullen relishes the opportunity to prance, curl and shudder her way through the reminiscences. Part Molly Bloom, part Brunhilde, part Bible-bothering biddy, she enjoys a “fag” as she relives the freedom – not “mechanics”, as they once were – of her ongoing sexual adventures. Aoife Kavanagh’s excellent sound design allows an ambient rustle to grow into a metallic clatter as Máire then spirits herself back to the laundry. It says something about how much we’ve all learned that the script sees no need to flesh out history that has taken on the quality of grim legend. It’s a perfect set-up for an actor with the full arsenal of theatrical weapons.

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The second half takes a literal swivel as Máire’s gay son, Mel, played with plausible exasperation by Jamie O’Neill, arrives to confront her about the relationship. Ciaran Bagnall’s set rotates from the messy bedroom – a good place for a protracted Beckett death – to a soulless kitchen that politely hammers home the now of it all. It initially feels as if Mel is taking on the mantle of the prissy kids in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, appalled at their mother daring to give in to sexual urges, but he has some genuinely disturbing news about the man she might love.

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Those revelations risk tipping the project into melodrama as Máire, hitherto sympathetic, reveals a streak of illiberalism and a penchant for self-delusion. We end up with a heightened, blaring blast of panicked emotion that would, from the opening monologue, have seemed a most unlikely final destination.

Happily, Louise Lowe’s disciplined direction of this Landmark production (which first premiered online, for Cork Midsummer Festival, during lockdown) just about keeps the vehicle from spinning off the track. The Saviour is certainly at its best in the opening showcase for Mullen’s stagecraft, but the second section, during which an older woman in flouncy salmon confronts a younger man in mid-price chinos, is slyly clever in its implicit wondering if, as Máire plainly believes, the nation has lost some of its fag-ash character. It’s all there in a resonant central character whose abundant flaws only contribute to her juicy humanity. A Kathleen Ni Houlihan for the post-Covid rearrangements.

Continues at the Pavilion Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 8th