“Context is everything.”
Funny thing about Lippy – its premise has got outside it. The play opens with a post-show talk that deconstructs a performance that never happens, much like the media furore surrounding theatre company Dead Centre’s latest offering built anticipation while emptying the expectation of its potency.
Daniel Reardon’s involved. And Mark O’Halloran has contributed something to the script. It’s about that mysterious case of the suicide pact between four women in Leixlip in 2000 that was never quite resolved – eerie, really. That’s a lot of hooks. You tot them up before you go into the theatre, but they don’t exactly reach to what you’ll experience once you’re in there. Much like it’s ludicrous to imagine one could get inside the final moments of someone’s life and understand what led them to that point just by hearing the bald facts of their case.
We don’t and can’t know what happened in the house during the last days of three sisters and their aunt who made a decision to end their lives in hiding. But Lippy is not directly about those four mysterious women and their story; it’s about interpretation and meaning, those niggling philosophical problems that are endlessly alluring and resolutely insoluble.
The play demarcates a space of silence around the emotional content of the known facts of the event. In the piece, the room the women inhabit for their last hours is a site for the surreal where physical laws are upended and time is torqued; furniture defies gravity and clocks accelerate through days.
This space of the unknowable doesn’t pretend to access the truth. So, with the exception of an intentionally garbled monologue by Caitriona Ní Mhurchú (taken from a real letter found in the house after the death of the women), we have the (mostly mute) characters of the sisters uttering isolated inanities that are intentionally meaningless. “Remember to put the cat out,” are the final words of Ní Mhurchú’s character as she passes.
Daniel Reardon, in his role as a lip-reader brought in to analyse the last-known video footage of two of the women, acts as the on-stage totem for the role of the playwright. He forces his way Michel Gondry-style into the lawless realm, emerging from a pile of rubbish bags on the ground. He’s an uneasy interloper in their world, an awkward botanist of the probable truth. His presence in their house jars, although perhaps not always in the way intended. Occasionally, the tone of the dialogue between the sisters and Mr. Reardon misses its mark, the persona of the lip reader from the future sitting too uneasily within the ghostly world of the women.
There are moments of excellence. The at once deadpan and wilfully silly post-show-pre-show talk, with the play’s author Bush Mourkarzel playing host to Daniel Reardon as Daniel Reardon, is pitch perfect. Also particularly affecting is dancer Joanna Banks’ exit, the frail elegance of her form as it’s buffeted about by a leaf-blower a poignant counterpoint to Adam Welsh’s laconic wielding of the machine.
Mark O’Halloran’s closing monologue, read by Gina Moxley to footage of a Beckettian close-up of her lips, fills the stage and shrinks the perspective of the viewer to a final point that closes in on nothingness. A mulch of childhood memory, musings on life’s end and borrowings from Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein [O’Halloran transmutes Wittgenstein’s famous proclamation ‘Death is not an event in life’ to ‘Death is not an event but a process’], the stark lines communicate the last thoughts of the remaining sister. Her conclusion? We all end alone.
As the real-life case remains unresolved, the play does not settle on a fathomable conclusion. If art aims at universal truth, a way in to the ultimately unknowable experience of the other, Lippy’s tribute to the strange and sad departure of Frances, Josephine, Brigid Ruth and Catherine is a fitting one: this trying to know is a futile endeavour and yet we keep at it, hopefully hopeless.
