Safe House
Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★☆☆☆
Inside an empty ball alley, where she has made a bleak refuge for herself, a young woman sings a song of yearning: “Trying to think the new thoughts. / Dive into the blue.” Enda Walsh’s lyric in Safe House, a song cycle that he created with the composer Anna Mullarkey for the Abbey Theatre, echoes the yearning for escape from some of his previous plays, where characters are desperately confined by their lives. “I want the tide to take me out of me and give me someone different,” as Runt says in Disco Pigs, Walsh’s breakthrough work, from 1996.
Coincidently, Safe House is set in the same period. Grace, a young woman who, in Kate Gilmore’s impressive performance, seems simultaneously childlike, looking to the floor and chewing on her tracksuit top, is seen amid a 1990s detritus of boxy televisions and vintage biscuit tins, speaking only through era-appropriate trip-hop songs. There is some of Disco Pigs’ dangerous nightlife, too, as she wanders drunkenly around a Galway village, with aggressive passersby following her, looking to pay her for sex.
Walsh and Mullarkey seem interested in showing how someone can become precariously vulnerable, as Jack Phelan’s elaborate video design reveals a history of trauma, depicting a girl’s birthday party where the guests look unnaturally stiff, and a mother unsmilingly holds a cigarette. Such lengthy screen sequences have the disconcerting effect of subordinating Gilmore’s performance to the production’s design, pushing her to the side to drink Grace into oblivion.
Walsh, who also directs, has been attracted to deliberate incoherence before – in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers an inaudible Cillian Murphy screamed that emotion through a loudspeaker – but what to make of Gilmore trying to sing over the recorded voice of a child Grace, as if in counterpoint, but with separate melodies impossible to hear? Mullarkey’s compositions come across as oppressively desolate.
Safe House: Enda Walsh’s new work is an oppressively desolate song cycle
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As the action moves into the recent past, during a grim period in Dublin, Grace is increasingly seen among the wreckage of a sad childhood: wearing a paper crown from a restaurant’s children’s meal, drinking on a throne cobbled together from street debris; while an interview clip voicing Mary Robinson’s hopes for women’s futures comes across as a false promise. Unsafe homelessness becomes represented by startling displays – by unexplained coughing-up of blood, and by the projection of a monstrously gigantic dog – that feel too extreme to map seriously.
In the production’s final songs, the iconography of a stolen childhood seems to recombine into a philosophy of resilience – “Come what may,” Grace sings as she returns to the bedroom of her abusive home. But the journey is accompanied by confusing ambiguities: a reassuring fantasy found amid the murk of an alcohol overdose; a dream of marrying her lewd, exploitative lover.
It does, at least, allow a redefining performance by Gilmore, who has been required to suppress a sense of adulthood to play childlike roles in the past. As Grace, she is finally that: a complex woman carrying around an inescapable childhood.
Continues at the Abbey, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, November 16th
