Daughter of God: Threatened by the world outside, tormented by the world within

Daughter of God

Granary Theatre, Cork

★★★★☆

“Do you remember the time you ate the cat?” Claire Loy’s Yulia, the mother of three daughters, asks in Roderick Ford’s new play, in which neurodiversity is not so much explored as declared. Shades of the mental prison house darken this production from Asylum theatre company, which is directed by Donal Gallagher. A cage of human dimensions dominates Medb Lambert’s design, an otherwise domestic setting where the other critical element is a large window through which three of the female residents peer at a threatening outside world.

This is, indeed, something like that of a society ruled by a Nazi regime, those days when Germany attempted to annihilate those of its citizens with mental or physical disabilities. Yulia’s eldest daughter, Yobby, locked in the cage, is distinctly disabled. Vocal but inarticulate, her cries suggest empathy and bewilderment. Her screams reveal that it is the world indoors that torments her.

Eleanor Walsh makes Yobby a potent presence in the emerging drama as Yulia brings parcels home from her work as a cleaner. Ostensibly sympathetic in Loy’s performance, and driven by fruitless conversations with her God, Yulia has a secondary career as a receiver of stolen body parts, which means an upgrade from her fridge to a chest freezer.

As Yobby and Neon, the middle sister, become suspicious, Caoimhe, the youngest sibling, in calipers, rhapsodises over a head only a little less gory than that of John the Baptist.

‘I have not had contact with my siblings for many decades, nor did I attend my parents’ funerals’

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As the family’s existence crumbles under the force of external events, its disasters come from within rather than without. Ford writes Caoimhe as a wickedly funny ventriloquist, a character in whom Michaela Murphy finds a witty kind of enchantment in a bewitching performance. Experienced and sexually explicit, Megan Haly’s Neon is the counterbalance of a threatened reality, a strident contrast to a diverse but doomed household.

Daughter of God ends at the Granary Theatre, University College Cork, tonight