Moment

Project Cube, Dublin

“It’s really stunningly grim,” says one character approvingly of an artist’s response to crime and its consequences. The work in question is by Nial, an abstract painter with a less abstract criminal record, who drains his canvas of colour to depict prison cells and psychological incarceration.

Those themes are also the materials of Deirdre Kinahan's new play for Tall Tales, but the method of Momentis entirely different. Focusing on a family rather than an individual, and working in objective detail over abstraction, her play is neither stunning nor grim, but works in sombre hues of compassion and realism.

One look at Maree Kearns’s set, an elaborately constructed kitchen and living room where a radio spills out recession updates and tea is always being brewed, suggests that only kitchen-sink realism will accommodate Kinahan’s tale. It’s a decision that brings confining consequences. Here, characters arrive in careful procession – the wary and watchful Niamh (Maeve Fitzgerald) happens by the family home, where her heavily medicated mother (Deirdre Donnelly) and sister (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) await the visit of an all-but-estranged brother Nial (Ronan Leahy) and his new partner (Natalie Radmall-Quirke).

Rationing out information in a crossfire of dialogue, director David Horan apportions clues along what is initially a gentle comedy of domestic awkwardness. By the time seven principal characters have clustered on the stage, manoeuvring around each other like rush-hour traffic in Mumbai, we know the family is skilled in avoiding collisions but that the events of the past 15 years are unresolved still.

Kinahan’s accumulation of detail and her elegant exposition provide a studied lesson in realism, but her audience is expecting more than a character study. Glance at a flier (“What happens when a child is killed and your child does the killing?”), and you wonder why the play won’t just cut to the chase. For all the assured performances, when tensions here ought to simmer another character arrives and the kettle is boiled instead.

The play comes alive when Nial’s past erupts with – literally – an emetic force, and Kinahan is finally free to explore knotty moral concerns in her second act. “I’m a different man and it’s a different life,” pleads Leahy’s Nial, as though trying to convince himself. But Fitzgerald’s Niamh, a strikingly haunted and gaunt figure, is unmoved: “Not for me it isn’t.” His victim, Niamh’s childhood friend, visits in flashback, but the play largely refrains from moralising or judgment, impartially tracing the fateful pivot point between an accident and an irretrievably crazed instant.

Kinahan dwells instead on the tortured family of an ambiguous killer and the limits of rehabilitation and forgiveness. In nuance and form, she represents an incarcerated family, each of whom has been handed a life sentence, their punishment and possible salvation present in every moment.

Until November 28