Before You Go

Buried inside the human heart are thoughts that lie too deep for words. This is certainly the case within the O’Hare family – Mary (Lisa Duffy), Brendan (James Doran) and their daughter Sorcha (Eimear Fearon) whose young life is awash with suppressed truths and unasked/unanswered questions. Shortly before leaving her home in the Irish borderlands for a new life in Melbourne, Sorcha embarks on a long-overdue investigation of her parents’ relationship, her mother’s death and her faltering connection to her father.

The play has emerged from a cross-border, cross-community arts project, devised and managed by writer Laurence McKeown and focused on sharing personal and communal histories. This intense, three-way exchange distils the experience of shared stories to the most fundamental domestic level.

Seated across a table in Liz Cullinane’s crisp, stage-within-a-screen set, director Paula McFetridge steers Sorcha and Brendan into an emotional collision course, their probing conversation punctuated by intensely personal interventions from the unearthly presence of Mary. Balancing an overload of exposition between two live characters and a third – who can be heard and seen only by the audience – is a tricky task, which occasionally falls victim to its own performance logic.

Through the unrelenting camera lens, Doran turns in a tough but tender performance as a man who struggles to express the love he feels for his partner and his daughter. As mother and daughter, Duffy and Fearon combine like two sides of the same coin, each harbouring doubts and inadequacies, one with fatal results, the other clutching at the elusive possibility of a brighter future.