Bladnoch Distillery, Wigtown, and touring 2007

Oengus MacNamara, Michael Glenn Murphy and Cara Kelly in Molly Sweeney.

THERE’S A FUNNY play by JM Synge called ‘The Well of the Saints’ in which two blind beggars are miraculously given their sight back. The joke is that after the novelty wears off, the couple start deeply to resent their new sense. They don’t care for the look of each other and they can’t ply their old trade any more. Disenchanted, they refuse a cure when their eyes fail them a second time.

There are echoes of this classic Irish drama in Brian Friel’s ‘Molly Sweeney’, except where Synge plays it for laughs, Friel explores the trauma. His central character is a fortysomething woman who has been blind since she was a baby and has lived what she would regard as a normal life.

Encouraged by her father to identify every plant in the garden by touch and smell alone, she has grown into a confident, life-embracing woman whose blindness is less of a disability than a descriptive characteristic.

For her husband, Frank, however, it is a troubling matter that requires his attention. He is one of nature’s enthusiasts, a well-meaning eccentric with a great thirst for knowledge but little useful application for the train-spotterish information he gathers. To cure Molly’s blindness becomes his obsession.

Enter Mr Rice, an eye specialist whose career never fulfilled his early promise and who sees in Molly the chance to redirect his meandering life. Frank and Rice are restless characters, subconsciously searching for a place where they can feel properly at home.

Molly, by contrast, is content and comfortable: she naturally has what they desire. But, encouraged by the men, she goes ahead with an operation only to find herself, like Synge’s characters, in a place that no longer feels like home.

More than being simply about blindness, the play is a metaphor for exile. Like a refugee who has crossed continents, Molly is neither one thing nor the other: lost in the land of the sighted, deprived of the familiar world of the blind. Having “cured” her, Frank and Rice can move on. Molly, however, hits a tragic dead end.

In Gregory Thompson’s first-rate production, revived by the National Theatre of Scotland after its award-winning debut at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow in 2005, this journey is movingly expressed. It also pulses with life and humour, thanks to the three superb performances by Michael Glenn Murphy, Oengus MacNamara and especially Cara Kelly which draw out Friel’s quirky character comedy even as they move towards tragedy.

Staged intimately with the audience on four sides of Ellen Cairns’ shattered mirror of a set, it makes for a thoughtful, touching and life-affirming night at the theatre.

© Mark Fisher, 2007

Links

• NTS
• Molly Sweeney (NTS)
• Dràma Na h-Alba
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog