Bedbound ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L TO R) Norma Sheahan, Liam Carney; Norma Sheahan; Liam Carney

Direction: Enda Walsh, Production Design: Fiona Cunningham, Lighting Designer: John Gallagher, Music composed and performed by Bell Helicopter, Sound Design: Bell Helicopter, Casting: Hughes & Rowan Casting.

Cast: Liam Carney, Norma Sheahan.

In Walshs hands, an account of a life spent flogging three-piece suites and Swedish pine furniture becomes both feverishly exciting and blackly comic, and his daughter (Norma Sheahan), her back curved and her hands grotesquely twisted, hangs on to his every word, as well as playing the supporting characters in her fathers brilliant career.

The daughters speeches are stranger and more tantalising. She speaks of the walls closing in on her, of her mother reading to her from a romantic novel, of a wonderful day by the sea which ended when she fell into a sewer and contracted the polio that now contorts her body so cruelly. She isnt even sure whether her father really is her father, but for both of them an overwhelming terror lies in the spaces between words, a panic brilliantly conjured by the terrifying bursts of electronic noise created by the shows composers, the oddly monikered Bell Helicopter.

Whats most remarkable about Bedbound is the vivid precision of Walshs account of murderous monomania. So persuasive are Dads driven monologues that, as the body count rises and the horrors accumulate, you come to believe in the unbelievable. More astonishing still, this desperately bleak and frightening drama finally offers a beautifully judged glimpse of redemption.

Walsh, in short, has created a fully realised, weirdly disorientating dramatic world unlike any you have previously encountered. He directs his own play with frantic intensity and there are tremendous performances. At times it is hard to watch Sheahans ferocious, unbearably poignant performance as the daughter, and she is so persuasive as a polio victim that when her father carries her during the curtain calls you believe the actress really must be disabled.

Carney tells the story of the fathers life with speed, precision and detail, luring you into the dark heart of a psychopath with a humour, relish and energy that makes him frighteningly good company. Hypnotic and emotionally shattering, Bedbound is an uncomfortable, unforgettable tour de force.

Charles Spencer The Daily Telegraph

Bang. What appears to be a white screen, waiting for someone to project a film on to it, crashes noisily forward to reveal what looks like a large, crazy cupboard but is actually a tiny crazy room. The walls are a dirty, spotted mauve and the matching bed beneath them contains two people: a pink-clad, crippled girl, whose lips twist this way and that, like some rubbery sea-creature, and her father, who wears a tattered suit three times too small for him. Its hard to recall a more arresting opening to any modern play, even an Irish one.

.As directed by Walsh himself, the piece is as fierce and frightening as, at just one hours running time, its brief and brusque. The writing has the power to sweep away literal-minded questions, such as why Dad hasnt been arrested, if not for murder, at least for dumping his wife in the road. And the two performers are as intense and committed as they could be. Think again of Beckett, but Beckett with a broken bottle in his hand and with personal and social rather than metaphysical concerns on his mind and youve Bedbound.

Benedict Nightingale The Times

Nothing quite so weird as the expressionist Bedbound, by Enda Walsh, award-winning author of Disco Pigs, has hit the London stages main tracks in years. And hit us the production does almost literally in the alarming first seconds. Theres a literal coup de theatre when a wall-sized square of wood dangerously crashes down on the stage floor with an almighty bang: there in a cramped, wooden recess revealed by the falling masonry is a bed with a crimson duvet. Upon it kneels the huddled figure of a polio-wracked figure called Daughter and, cowering beneath the sheet, a man by the name of Dad.

In torrential streams of poetic Irish consciousness, these waters coloured by generous dashes of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the duo are eternally fated to enact crucial scenes from Dads life, with Daughter playing crucial people who crossed her fathers path in Cork and Dublin and did not live to regret it. For as his life-story unfolds, Daddy is revealed as an ambitious, psychopathic murderer who incinerates, throat-slits and batters any one who stands in his way to control of Robsons Furniture Emporium, or simply anyone who he cannot stand.

Walsh describes murderous violence with contemporary, unabashed enthusiasm. But he resorts to antiquated symbolism of the sort adored by Theatre of the Absurd playwrights. Obsessed by shame over his daughters polio, contracted when she slips into a cess-pool, Dad constructs ever more walls in his house, eventually entombing Daughter and his wife in a space only big enough for one bed. Melodramas swish and roar therefore, hangs portentously over Walshs nightmare fantasia. But the playwrights beautiful, vivid turn of speech, by turns vulgar, lyrical and precise, makes the familiar fresh and strange.

Nicholas de Jongh Evening Standard