Irish stew a dark and heady meal

By GREG DIXON

Something peculiar is happening in the Herald Theatre. In front of me a kitchen-sink drama is being played out in a tiny mess of a flat. Mary and her cousin and carer Lizzie are talking - well, to be fair, only Lizzie, between slugs of spirits, is talking.

It seems she wants Mary to return from whence she came, to the nut house. But that's not the intriguing thing.

No, what draws the eye, what is really quite strange, is what's going on behind the beaten-up flat, the beaten-up people and their talk: there stand three black crosses, and moving between them and listening in is a mysterious, vaguely malevolent presence, a dancing man-boy named Christie.

To say that actress and playwright Geraldine Brophy's new play Mary's Gospel is a complex psycho-drama - and I gathered this from watching just half an hour of rehearsal - played out in ordinary yet extraordinary circumstances, might be an understatement.

Directed by Stuart Devenie, the two-act play seems a truly dense stew. It uses the biblical story of Mary and the birth and death of Christ as a framework for a story of a family bound together by dark secrets and hardship, of relationships shaped and scarred by mental illness, moral illness and - to complicate matters even further - good old-fashioned Irish Catholicism.

Like Brophy's most recent work - the reworkings of Shakespeare's King Lear as Leah and the Vagina Monologues as Viagra Monologues - Mary's Gospel is a new twist on something we think we already know.

"I like to think of myself as a theatrical terrorist," she says. "I like to flip things, to look at things from another perspective."

And so the background to her new play is this: many years ago Mary, a 15-year-old Irish Catholic, went to a party in Naenae and became pregnant with Christie. She seeks Lizzie's help, but is sent to a carpenter called Joe, who works for Mary's father, the almighty Paddy O'Malley.

The play spans 24 hours some 30 years on, with Mary, a mental health outpatient (played by Catherine Wilkin), now living with Lizzie (Brophy), a caregiver who can't wait to get her sick cousin off her hands. Christie (dancer Taane Mete) is now dead but very much in Mary's world.

"I've employed three separate language dimensions. Christie, the male character, exists in the surreal world. His form of communication is dance. Lizzie is firmly in the corporeal world and, as such, talks as we would expect and is unaware of Christie.

"Mary inhabits both the surreal and corporeal worlds because of her illness and, therefore, employs both poetry and naturalistic speech to communicate with Lizzie and Christie.

"The structure of the piece itself moves between naturalistic domestic scenes and the inherent beauty and ugliness of the banal and [Mary's] gospels themselves, which are narrative-driven poetry."

Brophy, who has an ear for strong dialogue, has filled her script with the bleak, black humour of the Irish sort.

The Irish cultural perspective to Mary's Gospel - the play opens tonight, St Patrick's Day - is just one strand, and Brophy hopes her audience will be stimulated by the other themes woven through her play.

"The debates will and should continue about the manner in which we, as a society, a government and individually, care for our mentally ill. A play is another way of stimulating conversations and understanding."

Performance

* What: Mary's Gospel

* Where and when: Herald Theatre, from today