WHILE Liveline currently debates the propriety of women carrying condoms, the two plays at Bewley's (Grafton Street) are linked by their efforts to exorcise the ghosts of a sexuality that may be dead, but which exerts an enormous influence from the grave.
A Galway Girl (by Geraldine Aron) and Dermot Bolger's The Holy Ground complement each other in their portrayal of the complex ways in which men and women lay together and stayed together through timidity, through conventional Catholicism, through habit, through loneliness. Two widows (both played with a precise sensitivity by Mariah Neary). reflect on lives of compliant desperation.
Aron's play consists of two interlocking monologues.
Maisie stands for refinement: coasters under the drink, private schools and salad cream. She comes, as husband Dermot (Patrick David Nolan vividly boorish) says, from a line of "know-alls and Holy Joes". She is permanently wedlocked to a vulgar man (rough crowd, "coarse fellows in cheap suits"). It is a clash of two cultures - traditional domestic femininity versus the cult of the lads: all bottles and butts. Their lives hardly connect; yet Maisie, like so many of her generation, sticks with him and kisses his cheek as he departs this world. It is tersely written - sharp, ironic and poignant - and neatly directed by Rebecca Roper on the postage-stamp stage.
Bolger's monologue is a trifle softer, but nonetheless tragic. As Monica packs black plastic bags with the relics of her late husband, she plots the course of their marriage through shy, inarticulate love, to childlessness, to a bitter upturn of feelings, any tenderness obliterated by religious zeal. Bolger packs in too much plot (did she poison him or didn't she?) and hangs up too many topical themes, but it is closely observed and moving. Under David Byrne's direction the mix of sexual ignorance, goodwill and brutality, incoherence, frustration and distorted piety is tellingly conveyed. If one can judge by `Liveline', women today are demanding a much better deal.