One of the first shows at the newly reopened Focus Theatre.
Irish Times has the review here. (click for full link)
It is 1893, among Ireland’s landed gentry, and high in a tower a young woman is barking. What is the reason behind her strange eruptions, nervous mannerisms and flailing convulsions? Is it, as her husband and a Catholic priest believe, a sign of demonic possession? Are these the symptoms of a barely understood neurological disorder, wonders a young doctor familiar with the work of George Giles de la Tourette? Or, as the audience for Elizabeth Moynihan’s play suspects, is this character in the merciless grip of a dramatic metaphor?
Developed from a one-act version first staged in 2007, Moynihan’s engaging play pursues each diagnosis. Exploring the confinement of a woman in a time before suffrage, hemmed in by politics and expression, the condition makes a convenient symbol – given further echoes by allusions to Rapunzel’s tower.
But Moynihan’s scrupulous research depicts both disorder and social context as something more unsettlingly real and the play occupies an intriguing space between the drift of fable and the facts of medical history.
Click here for the rest of the article
Runs until Sept 18th.
