Thérèse

Project Arts Centre – Cube★★☆☆☆

In a playground somewhere in Dublin, a group of mothers familiar with neglect and shame worry about the future. What if they transmit their distress to their children?

“We’re damaged goods,” says one of them with sad acceptance. Louise Lewis’s play Thérèse feels like something that’s been overlooked: a portrait of fortysomethings with memories of living in Dublin’s declining estates during the 1980s. It also feels busily indebted to Greek drama, with reports of war and defied gods’ laws, in ways that risk rerouting and slackening its telling.

In the version of 1980s Dublin remembered by the play’s women, the establishment’s response to violent unrest by impoverished inhabitants is to send in the Army. It’s a disturbance that gives Lewis’s character Thérèse her worldview: the fighting residents are “animals”; the soldiers are “saviours”. Other mothers have an alternative perspective, suspecting an oppressively classist establishment (“‘antisocial behaviour’ is a war, isn’t it?”).

Much of Lewis’s drama relies on Thérèse being nudged by these other playground mothers (Amy Conroy, Orla Fitzgerald and Aoibhe Beaumont-Walsh), a chorus who communicate in synchronised speech, prompting easy recollections from her past, while offering a therapy-like perspective on the effects of shame and trauma. It’s mostly rather frictionless, like a conversation where no one disagrees.

That’s unfortunate because there is something incredibly consoling here, that, in the identity change of becoming a parent, having a child reflecting and changing your sense of self could possibly save you from your past.

In the opening clamour of mothers calling after kids on the playground, I was reminded for an instant of The Family, the play Lewis devised with Theatreclub in 2012. That brought the noise of intergenerational trauma to the stage by having characters eternally talk over each other – the opposite to the overly neat, enlightened speech of Thérèse.

Runs at Project Arts Centre – Cube, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until September 12th