Brian Foster's first play, developed from a rehearsed reading at the Lyric's 1999 Signposts season, is, in effect, several plays, jostling for centre stage and masking many of its writer's intentions. It is not difficult to discern the influence of Friel and McDonagh in its setting and content, though Foster opts for a straight-on, humorous approach to his take on small town mores in 1960s Donegal.
Everywhere Mary Conlon turns there are voices, real and imagined - the voices of the lonely, screwed-up women of the soundtrack, the messages borne on the crashing waves outside her window, the whispering of the Killybegs gossips and the confused voices in her own head, spilling out in the curious mix of blaspheming and inappropriately contemporary cursing, with which she lambasts her conniving, bedbound mother Emily (Ronnie Masterson).
The rather old-fashioned humour is of the scatalogical one-liner variety, with an emphasis on chamber pots and bodily excretions. It is not, however, until very late in proceedings that we get a hint of the symptomatic part it plays in this abusive mother-daughter relationship and the signals it sends out of the thoroughly nasty denouement which is to follow.
After the interval, the arrival of John Hewitt's touchingly realised, hesitant suitor Patsy Doogan takes the action up a notch, before it suddenly zaps into overdrive, with a series of bizarrely melodramatic incidents. As it stands, the production is significantly too long and director Roland Jacquarello would do well to subject it to some judicious pruning. Such an exercise would undoubtedly help to give purpose to Anne Bird's potentially disturbing study of Mary's instability, define the dark, squalid claustrophobia captured by Vanessa Hawkins's set and free something of the spirit of the butterfly of the title.
The Butterfly of Killybegs is at the Lyric until April 15th (to book phone Belfast 381081), then tours to Armagh, Ballyshannon, Letterkenny, Derry, Ballymena, Coleraine, Cookstown, Portadown, Downpatrick, Enniskillen, Monaghan, Sligo, Longford, Mullingar, New Ross, Kilkenny and Waterford.
Classical news and extended classical listings by Michael Dervan are accessible on www.ireland.com/dublin/
