Constriction
Studio 2, Lir, Dublin 2
★★★★☆
A Socratic conversation between two disembodied women unspools like a stream of consciousness, exploring what it means to be a mother, circling themes of agency, loneliness and the unbearable weight of societal expectations. This is the frame of Mai Ishikawa’s Constriction, a haunting and lyrical meditation on motherhood, identity and choice.
Set aboard a Japanese bullet train we never see, the one-woman performance instead asks the audience to feel its motion, the rattling soundscape by Benjamin Burns, the sharp slices of Kevin Murphy’s light design and Ishikawa’s own body in restless, fluid movement. The effect is both physical and psychological, a journey down a constricted path that is at once deeply personal and startlingly universal.
The ambiguity of the dialogue performed by Kate Finegan, Fiona Breen and Ishikawa herself – are these voices mother and child, self and other, past and present? – suspends the audience in a state of uncertainty, echoing the dissociation and fragmentation that accompany psychological strain.
Ishikawa’s physical performance, shaped with the movement director Charlotte O’Reilly, embodies the paradox of freedom and confinement. Two chairs arranged as though train seats become shifting symbols, companions, opposites, burdens. The plain red bodycon of Ishikawa being slowly smeared with black dust from the chairs layers striking visual metaphors of blood relations, nurture and the suffocating weight of reality.
READ MORE
In this gradual smearing the play most clearly mirrors the mother’s isolation, trauma endured in silence, and uneasy negotiation between selfhood and nurturing.
By interspersing a Japanese folktale of child abandonment called Kosute (adapted from Lafcadio Hearn’s recording of it), Ishikawa expands her narrative from intimate testimony to cultural memory, while making it resonate globally.
Constriction is cathartic and not an easy watch. Surreal, unflinching and fluid, it confronts the raw mental toll of facing reality and asks, with searing honesty, what does freedom for a mother truly mean?
Runs at the Lir, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Sunday, September 14th
