Paula Meehan's Cell draws on her experiences of giving workshops in prisons and her deep empathy for the women with whom she worked. It is passionately committed to lay bare the tension and the hurt which lies within lives which have been hidden behind locked doors.
The policy of Calypso Productions is to deal with "issues of social and cultural importance". Garret Keogh's direction serves this purpose well. This is a visceral expose of lives bound with disembodied voices, automatic doors, intimate bodily functions deprived of any privacy, virus and abuse. Robert Ballagh's set is a claustrophobic cage.
Dominating the cell is Delo, monstrous, megalomaniac, a Nurse Ratchett on the block. This is her patch and by intimidation, drugs, sex and violence her will prevails. She is played with awesome verve by Eithne McGuinness, but there is a danger that we are tricked here into fascination with this creation, rather than absorption of the playwright's "anger and frustration".
More successful, more authentic is Barbara Bergin's Martha, a feisty street-urchin-turned-junkie. We get a strong sense of her doomed life, while she desperately sings in her chains. The pity and the awfulness are palpable, as they are in Laura Brennan's suicidal waif Lila. Joan Sheehy's assured mother figure, Alice, sheds a little humanity in a dark world.
The poet in Meehan moves the play beyond naturalism. Delo has a soaring diatribe which renders self-improvement, yoga and deep breathing laughable. Lila and Alice speak passages of lyrical beauty as they peer beyond the cell window.
The comic moments emerge slowly but are increasingly well barbed. I suspect that Cell will shed some of its self-consciousness as the production eases into its run.
Runs until Saturday, September 25th. To book phone 01-6770643
