by Rose Rushe
www.thelighthousekeeper.eventbrite.ie
A FAMILY crisis in real life has underscored the text and questions raised by Ella Daly’s new play, ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’. This City of Culture funded exercise is at Daghdha Space until Saturday 15 at 8pm, directed by Amalgamotion’s Ciarda Tobin, working with playwright and actress Helena Enright.
Daly, a Limerick woman now running Dublin Youth Theatre, sets the scene: “The storyline is about a mother and daughter…it starts out with an urgent medical experience, in the hospital emergency room”.
The parent/ child dynamic now changes inexorably with this profound collapse. The after shock is this realisation and then others to do with the frustrating lack of joined-up thinking in aligning professional medical care, home care, the hospital system and that of social welfare to make sense of the new order, to make bearable the personal as child arrives at a place of parenting for one’s own.
Ella Daly is on to something with this terrible but everyday challenge that virtually all families have to negotiate. Life as we know it is taken hostage by ill health or tragedy and the equilibrium of who fosters whom is negotiable.
“There are four actors. The mother (Monica Spencer) and daughter (Joanne Ryan) are not named. There’s a nurse figure (Georgina Miller) who represents all the nurses one meets, the carer system, home help. Then the male (Aidan Crowe) is consultant, EMT, pharmacist, hospital porter – both Georgina and Aidan play multiple characters”.
She goes on to underline the theatricality and varied play of what could otherwise be a didactic piece. Set and lighting designer Sarah Jane Sheils has created a deep set for the vaulted space of Daghdha, allowing for different scenes to run at once: politician mouthing to fore while the patient is bathed tenderly.
The Lighthouse Keeper? A recurring motif that brings together much, from Daly’s own life to a loop within this play. It is, among other things, the title of a crime thriller by PD James that intercuts action.
