Family affairs

ANYTHING BUT LOVE,The Belltable, O'Connell St, Limerick until Dec 11, 8pm €22/€18 061-319866 belltable.ie

In 1934, the Limerick writer Kate O'Brien cast her sights back the 1880s, where she found the conflicted heroine of her novel, The Ante-Room.

Caught between two inextinguishable forces, Agnes nursed a secret passion for her sister’s husband, Vincent, while tormented by the stifling censure of her Catholic faith.

In Mary Coll’s new contemporary adaptation you can guess which of these impulses remains. Without the sustaining and suffocating presence of the church, however, conscience and contrivance are the only barriers between Annie, as she has been renamed, and her desire.

O’Brien’s human drama remains, though, as layered and heightened as a current soap opera. Annie leaves religious observance to the Polish nurse of her dying mother, Vincent makes his overtures across her unhappy but oblivious sister, while her once syphilitic, now HIV-positive, brother carps tartly from the sidelines.

For the audience of Joan Sheehy’s production, Coll’s won’t be the only act of refurbishment to draw attention. This premiere marks the re-opening of Limerick’s Belltable Arts Centre following two years under the scaffolding. However different the play and the premises may now seem, their location and souls are deliberately and distinctly unchanged: 130 years later, an Irish family is arguing over love, death and property. Plus ça change.

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