Oldbridge Estate, Drogheda
Louise Lowe’s new work for Upstate Theatre Project, the first instalment of the company’s Shared History Programme, is a site-specific installation in a place of historical significance. Or, to put it more accurately, it is a theatrical haunting. Visitors to the grand 18th-century Oldbridge Estate, which holds the Battle of the Boyne visitors’ centre, might expect its ghosts to be politically divisive and dazed with history. Instead, they find a superstitious maid who cooks, prays, loves and obeys.
As a young kitchen servant in the 1920s, Angela Mitchell left only the faintest impression on Irish history. But if the site suggests that history is written by the victors, here it is more modestly told by “the help”, with Angela’s recollections of Big House events, professional and religious obedience and private heartaches retrieved from the Drogheda Local Voices oral history archive.
Led through a circuit of six rooms, four people at a time, the audience finds a variation on Angela’s character in each one, an attempt on her life.
Although respectful to the truth, Lowe has never been one for stale detail, staying more alert to Angela’s interior life and that of the space itself.
Martin Collins, as an outwardly stern butler, suddenly begins a dance that ruptures decorum, slipping his body over and under a table, each movement an expression of some inexpressible frustration.
In the sepulchral gloom of another room, ushered into atmospherics by Vincent Doherty’s sound and Owen Boss’s design detail, a young Angela wakes the body of her employer, musing over a whole house of servants with “no one at all to work for”. It’s fascinating to hear those words repeated by Angela herself, in a recording within a less considered room, but it’s what Angela leaves unsaid that inspires Lowe towards more lyrical display: Robbie O’Connor and Gillian Durnin performing a passionate and uncertain dance of courtship in a musty cellar, or a confiding Julie Logue cloaking the loss of a child in superstition.
In one comic and rather moving improvisation from Niamh Shaw, who recruits her audience into washing bed sheets while she describes supernatural occurrences, we are asked outright whether we believe in ghosts. Those who do will assume that such haunting figures have unresolved business with the living. But even sceptics, fresh from these elliptical encounters with an unassuming, dutiful everywoman, should be given pause for thought.
