Novels set in the world of the theatre are an attractive proposition for both writers and readers, bringing with them built-in drama, a readily customised and vivid setting and the opportunity to create characters who are both themselves but also overtly engaged in pretending to be other people.
Striking examples are Beryl Bainbridge’s An Awfully Big Adventure and, more recently, Joseph O’Connor’s Shadowplay, the real-life dynamic between Bram Stoker, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at its heart. Rosemary Hennigan’s debut novel falls not only within this tradition, but also makes use of the device of the play-within-a-play, the most famous example of which is probably Hamlet.
Dara, an aspiring but hitherto entirely unsuccessful actor – save for a starring role in Annie back home on the Beara Peninsula – is about to give up; there’s only so long you can kip on your sister’s couch in a tatty Dublin flat and ignore the anxious entreaties of your parents to choose a more sustainable way of life. But suddenly, she is cast as the female lead in the revival of a three-hander called The Truth Will Out by the charismatic and highly-strung Eabha de Lacey.
Complex premise
Based on the unresolved sudden death of a fellow pupil at Eabha’s boarding school, of which she and her brother were the only witnesses, the play’s first outing was met with controversy, protest and, for its former cast, obscurity; there is little to suggest that, this time round, things will be different.
Hennigan explores multiple aspects of her complex premise: the ethics of manipulating disputed reality in order to make art; the unnerving metamorphoses that actors are required to undergo, and their complicity when they portray flawed and possibly culpable figures; the lengths that the desperation to make one’s mark might stretch.
But there is a danger, in both theme and setting, of falling into cliche and melodrama, and it’s one that she doesn’t always manage to avoid, her writing sometimes lapsing into stock phrases and her characters’ tangled motivations becoming simply too tortuous for the reader to feel truly engaged. As the novel progresses through the play’s fraught rehearsals towards what will clearly be an eventful opening night, one feels that perhaps a tighter focus might have helped this entertaining but slightly haphazard novel.
