A man and a woman meet again for the first time in nine years, brought back together by the memory of the child they lost... Once-Off Productions bring the award-winning play Poison by acclaimed Dutch playwright Lot Vekemans to Galway and Dublin this May and June; performed by actors Naoise Dunbar and Rachel O'Byrne, it's a powerful work that explores grief, love, and the possibility of living on. Below, director Lianne O'Shea introduces a production that 'asks us, as audiences, to do some work'.
Poison was a play I came across by accident. I was working with some acting students who had selected it as part of their showcase. That first day I had no context for the play, but was immediately drawn to the sparseness of the language, the way the characters’ thoughts fell out across the page and the fact that what was being left unsaid felt every bit as important as what they were saying.
I went home that night, read the play, and fell in love.
There are plays that just hook into you from that first read, and this was that for me. But just because you love something doesn’t make it easy. That’s something He and She (the characters in the play) have experience of. They meet for the first time in 9 years in the cemetery where their son is buried, having been informed that his grave will need to be moved due to contamination. We learn that in the aftermath of their son’s death, their marriage has failed and a decade later, grief and their attempts to live with it are still very present albeit very different. This coming back together is not easy.
Listen: RTÉ Arena on RTÉ Radio 1 takes a deeper dive into Poison
Though quite funny in parts, this is perhaps not an easy story to ask a company of people to work on – or perhaps an easy one to present to audiences, but I think it is a vitally important one.
Why is it that grief has occupied the core of the work I’ve been interested in recently? Certainly we value those moments in a theatre where the whole house is laughing out loud together. There is something about the shared joy and the expression of that with abandon that we prize. But I think that there is as great a value in coming together, yes in a room full of strangers, and sharing an emotional reaction to something – even, or indeed especially, if that reaction is to cry. To hear how the breathing of the people around you changes, and know that you are not alone in what you are experiencing, to be held up in this united sorrow and to be reminded of our extraordinary ability as humans for deep radical empathy.
There are plays that just hook into you from that first read, and this was that for me.
Our world can make us believe we are isolated, separating us from the broad community around us. It can try and make us buy into the notion that there is a right answer. That there is a correct stance to take on something and therefore by extension a wrong answer, an opinion which is deserving of ridicule or disdain. We become conditioned to want things that are going to present us with that answer. But I think where theatre excels is in denying us that, in presenting us instead with difficult questions asking us to participate in that. Asking us to think about what we would do or feel in that situation, to consider ‘what if’? It is not easy… it asks us, as audiences, to do some work.
But here’s the other wonderful thing about theatre – it is art which is being created in real time in front of you. It does not exist without you, it requires your creative input as an audience, you are not just passively watching on. Your engagement with Poison, your willingness to see their situation from both sides; to acknowledge cruelty but not recourse to blame, your ability to have empathy for both of their positions is a political act in the modern world, it is a hopeful act and it is made all the more powerful because you know you are not doing it alone.
Poison is at The Mick Lally Theatre, Galway from 28-30 May, and the Project Arts Centre Cube, Dublin, from 3-6 June.
