The Leaves of Heaven

The Complex, Dublin

★★★

The tragedy of Francie Brady, the protagonist of Pat McCabe's darkly comic novel The Butcher Boy, was that he was an innocent who eventually became as guilty as sin. With a mind that retreated into comic-book escapism and religious reveries, Francie was made a monster over time, and his last known whereabouts were in prison. There McCabe might have left him, as both a stage and film adaptation did, but now we get to catch up with the butcher man in a play that works less as a sequel than a bemusing post script.

Staged by Co-Motion, which (in a former life) first staged McCabe's Frank Pig Says Hello as an energetic two-hander, the production marks a return to director Joe O'Byrne's playfully frugal aesthetic. Brian Mallon plays Francie, now in his 60s and little more advanced, opposite Mairead Devlin, who takes many forms, including his now-exhausted confidante, the Virgin Mary ("Eternity, Francie, is such a long time," she complains). Confined for years to Dundrum Mental Hospital, Francie's reality seems to distend into harrowing delusions, or, just as often, a scattering of reanimating metaphors.

With a fetching make-and-do reliance on sets constructed from cardboard and its expansive dramatis personae served by rudimentary puppets, Francie’s world can resemble a purgatorial afterlife, still buffeted by guilt and tormenting visitations, or a self-constructed fantasy in which he often narrates and commands the action. Whether he, or anyone else here, can be forgiven or rehabilitated, the play is nudged along by an awareness that everyone is just passing through. The residents wonder about the hospital’s move to Portrane, over the sombre tones of Schubert, while Francie, living with cancer, has no intention of joining them.

“Remember, no soul is beyond redemption,” insists a supportive Professor, believing all lives can be lived again “but somehow better”. That Francie recalls this professor’s death early on, and that the same professor will later bemoan Francie’s passing, gives you some sense of the temporal confusion and misty re-incarnations of the play.

Abounding with more characters than consequences, its tortuous narrative can strain your patience, though, as can the undecided representation of lives as leaves drifting from a tree, then as paper leaves billowing from a book, as though McCabe is unwilling to settle on a single metaphor. Or perhaps Francie, now a writer, has taken hold of the narrative himself. Appointed a conduit “for all human suffering”, he has been condemned to this liminal space, and though he may write his way out, the production conveys a more worrying sense that we may have to share eternity – such a long time – with him.

Until November 27th