Everyman Palace, Cork
Grief, as Joan Didion advises in The Year of Magical Thinking, has its place, but also its limits. In this Everyman Palace Production of the play both location and limitations are explored with the questioning honesty characteristic of the writer.
Didion first tackled the subject of her husband’s sudden death in a memoir of the same name; that death was followed within 18 months by the death of their daughter. Magical thinking is Didion’s version of the “if” theory of primitive superstition, the belief that by appeasing the gods evils will be averted and good will triumph. Her astonishment that she has reverted to such bargaining, immersing herself in the rituals of denial as if death were a reversible error, provides the tension sustaining the script through 90 uninterrupted minutes.
Screen-writer and novelist, married for many years to the writer John Gregory Dunne, Didion is one of America’s most sophisticated and prominent literary figures, holding with her husband the unshakable conviction that knowledge is not just power, but control. This story tells, with some humour, how she tries to make catastrophe a subject for project management; this production shows how director Mary Curtin frames the narrative with the simplicity required to allow the emotions and the bewilderment to reverberate.
But Didion herself is not fiction; although the play suggests otherwise, she is not Everywoman. Meeting this challenge, Gerry McLoughlin imposes a creative authority to make the whole piece her own: unafraid of silence; subtle but significant in gesture; her voice measuring the cadences of her sentences; and confident in her pace (sometimes a little too random) around Lisa Zagone’s black furniture and backdrop of galactic clouds. Tracked by Paul Denby’s sympathetic lighting, she also manages the transitions which fill in the life shared by Didion and Dunne in a marriage which was not without its antagonisms.
In a single-handed play of this kind, credibility is all, and McLoughlin is compelling. She needed to be on opening night: dark and stormy outside, inside every door in the theatre was left to open and bang shut again like a meteorological commentary on the performance. Until Nov 6th
