Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✩
by Enda Walsh, directed by Autumn Smith
MacKenzieRo, Tarragon Studio Upstairs, Toronto
April 30-May 17, 2009
Thanks to MacKenzieRo, Bedbound, a disturbing yet fascinating play from 2000, is now receiving its Canadian premiere. Its author, Enda Walsh, best known perhaps as the screenwriter for the acclaimed film Hunger (2008), is one of the brightest lights of recent Irish theatre. Bedbound combines the elusiveness of Beckett with Strindberg’s scathing depiction of human relations in a recognizably Irish synthesis of horror and humour.
True to the title, neither Dad (Richard Greenblatt) nor Daughter (Cathy Murphy) leave the grungy bed they so oddly share for the play’s 70 minutes. Dad, in slept-in suit and tie, talks compulsively about his rise and fall as a furniture salesman in Cork and Dublin, egged on by Daughter who plays the bit parts in a story she’s heard countless times. Periodically, when Dad winds down like a clock to seek respite in sleep, Daughter just as compulsively blurts out her fears in stream-of-consciousness, able to quell them only by reading a trashy romance novel or by revving up Dad to continue his life-story. We sense in both a pathological fear of silence that only streams of words can keep at bay. Polio keeps Daughter bedbound but what holds Dad there is a mystery. Prone as he is to violent exaggeration, can we believe his tales of murder and that he is hiding in a labyrinth built inside his house? Or does the bravura of his tales conceal a psychological paralysis parallel to the physical paralysis of Daughter?
With Dad, Greenblatt takes on a juicier role than he has played for years. He gives an overwhelming performance filled with ferocious intensity. Even when Dad tells of his great triumphs, his body betrays mania and his eyes a hunted look as if he felt as much on a cliff’s edge as does Daughter. For her part, Murphy plays Daughter, who looks much too clean and tidy for someone who has stewed in her own excrement, not as Dad’s equal but as his dependant, a woman suffocating from claustrophobia who needs her novel’s fantasy or better Dad’s bouts of scalding energy to survive. In his portrait of two people, interdependent but bound by mutual hatred and a shared fear of non-existence, Walsh presents an unforgettable emblem of living hell.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-05-05.
Photo: Richard Greenblatt and Cathy Murphy.
2009-05-05
Bedbound