Liz FitzGibbon and Aoibhéann McCann in Una McKevitt’s One Good Turn at the Abbey Theatre. Photo by Ros Kavanagh
Liz FitzGibbon and Aoibhéann McCann in Una McKevitt’s One Good Turn at the Abbey Theatre. Photo by Ros Kavanagh
This is the first show in 15 months on the Abbey’s main stage. An audience of 50, scattered throughout the auditorium, attends for this realist comedy about death and dying. Abbey debut playwright Una McKevitt has worked in the past with verbatim dialogue styles and documentary subjects and these experimental sensibilities are here translated into a traditional well-made play.
We have the central locus of Irish drama, the kitchen. Not the traditional hearth, but a modern fitted space with a coffee-and-cream tiled splashback and a touch of heritage wallpaper. Set designer Colin Richmond creates a neat, cottagey style with an Arnotts feel. Frank (Bosco Hogan) has emphysema and is heavily dependent on oxygen for daily functioning. He is also dying for a cigarette.
His wife Brenda (Catherine Byrne) is a long-suffering modern saint, keeping the family going. Their daughter Fiona (Liz FitzGibbon) has recently moved back home, having resigned her job with an insurance company.
The second daughter Aoife (Aoibhéann McCann) is on a trip home from London for a wedding. Thus, the family find themselves in a domestic forcing jar. Aoife’s old childhood friend Ciarán (Shane O’Reilly), whose beloved grandmother lives next door, drops in and out. During the course of the play his 98-year-old grandmother is rushed to hospital.
The two sisters bicker in an amusing fashion. The pressure on Brenda manifests itself as a lament that her family “has more problems than everyone else”. A highlight of the show is a ‘boomer’ speech, cunningly performed by Byrne, on how her generation used to keep quiet about their problems: “You told nobody nothing because nobody wanted to know.” Behind the humour hovers the spectre of death.