Terminus (Cambridge – Abbey Theatre, Dublin)

There’s a remorseless energy in [Mark O’Rowe]’s play for three persons driven by the rhythm of its verse and the beat of the rhyming couplets – sound and sense not so much echoing each other but completely, one might almost say fatally, entwined. Jon Bauser has provided his writer-director with a literal frame for his players, a silvered thing whose glass has fractured just as surely as the lives recounted.

Alternatively crouched in darkness or under the spotlight, we gradually learn what has brought them to this place from which there can surely be no return. But is this truly journey’s end? What the two woman and one man have experienced and share with us is horrible in all sense of the word but through it all, like light on a splinter of glass, there’s a glimmer of hope.

Both the women are excellent. [Olwen Fouéré] has the rasp of the hard-worked, hard-bitten failure of a redundant teacher, disengaged voluntary counsellor, former wife and discarded mother. Catherine Walker radiates the naïveté of the girl who wants too much to be loved, takes risks in pursuit of her dream and, again quite literally, comes a cropper. She paces it beautifully, drawing the audience into an understanding of that uneasy balance between want and fulfilment, the possible and the unachievable.

Declan Conlan has the most difficult of the three roles. He portrays the ultimate in split personalities; the feather-flutter of Milton’s Lucifer beats close overhead. But a lot of his dialogue is too softly spoken. There’s low key in the interest of subtle characterisation, certainly. There’s also inaudibility. They are not the same thing.

- by Anne Morley-Priestman