Triptych

Edna O’Brien’s play is like another cuntry; women certainly do things differently there. Triptych presents “a lyrical portrait of a man seen through the eyes of his three women”, namely Wife, Mistress and Daughter. Or, rather, not namely at all. While they have character names the programme lists only their male function. A play in 2008 that shows talented, rational, successful women as purely defined by The Man In Their Lives leaves itself with little to say.

The narrative charts, with some temporal confusion, the events and effects of an affair. The Man, Henry, remains unseen leaving the women to writhe, spout narration and clunky imagistic streams of consciousness, change shoes at every lighting cue (how many pairs of wedges can a mistress want?) and refer to their “cunts” and to doctors “sticking fingers up” them with tedious self-congratulation.

As Wife, Pauline, Terry Norton presents a drunken neurotic female in a manner that robs the character of any humour, dignity or wisdom and makes the idea of being married to her for 20 years sound a very long time indeed. Luminous beauty Orla Brady, of Mistresses and the undervalued Servants, would seem every man’s dream lover but I wondered if the omni-absent Henry also had trouble hearing her at times. Jessica Ellerby charms as the Skins generation daughter-princess even though burdened with an improbable name, Brandy, an intolerable meandering monologue and character development that has scant relation to her father’s infidelities.

As the language ricochets from improbable duologues to unconvincingly poetic soliloquies so the actors totter up and down the narrow strip of stage. (The chessboard floor possibly Paul D Burgess’s visual indication of the games people play, the calculated moves they make?) Flanked by audience on two sides the cast cannot fail to be invisible to some of us for some of the time. At others, in a production where Sean Mathias has decreed that slips are short and rolling around is sexual expression, we can see rather too much. These women can’t even sit on a chair without spreading their legs.

Edna O’Brien rightly rejoices in a literary reputation that has described her as a descendent of Joyce. In the 60s her Country Girls novels shook the establishment with her comedic, stark, brutal and sexually honest portraits of Irish womanhood. Triptych, despite it’s insistence on modernity, seems stuck in yesteryear.

– Triona Adams