Leaving grief in her wake
Cork playwright and actress Irene Kelleher brings all the quirks of a West Cork wake to the stage, ham sandwiches included, in her latest solo show.
It’s a wake, alright: here are the ham sandwiches and cold sausages, there’s the giant aluminium teapot. And here’s the young woman desperately performing all sorts of psychological gymnastics to avoid confronting her mother’s death.
In Wake, now running at Cork Arts Theatre, Irene Kelleher takes to the stage as Lily, a young woman whose mother, Rebecca, has just died from cancer.
As she battles to confront the loss of her mother, she serves tea to, and provides a deliciously catty commentary on, a host of familiar yet caricature-like attendees at the wake.
Only child Lily runs from grief, turning to distractions in the form of wine, sexual intrigue and family dynamics, before finally summoning the courage to enter “the good room" where her mother is lying in state.
Expect some laugh-out-loud moments as well as poignant ruminations on loss in this hour-long production.
The clamour and hubbub of the wake is all present….but it’s all Kelleher, exhibiting her trademark physicality as she embodies a succession of bit parts including Toothy Teddy, Uncle Danny the priest whisperer, and Aunt Jess, a chain-smoking cougar.
Following on from Kelleher’s two previous critically acclaimed one-woman shows, the Ann Lovett inspired Mary and Me, and Gone Full Havisham, Wake marks a hat trick of successful solo endeavours for the writer and actress.
Despite her other work - she wrote and starred in two-hander The Misfit Mythology in 2019 - it’s her easily-staged, eminently tourable one-woman shows that have seen her nominated for awards at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and made her the darling of the Fit-Up circuit at home in Ireland; indeed, Fit-Up Festival director Geoff Gould also directs Kelleher in Wake.
Kelleher’s writing is shot through with gold when she avoids clichés and ventures into the idiosyncrasies of Irish rural life. She describes Lily’s love rival as “the kind of girl you’d expect to see on a Support Local poster,” introduces an uncle with a habit of asking people to guess how much his personal effects cost: “€3. Done Deal,” with a self-satisfied nod.
If at times Kelleher’s carousel of characters begins to feel thinly drawn, more designed to show off the actor’s range than to add to our understanding of Lily, that’s more a critique of the form of the one-man show than it is of Kelleher’s writing or performing; solo shows present all sorts of challenges, both for performer and for the audience, who need the space to rely on their imaginations to fill in the gaps.
While Wake is a thoroughly enjoyable hour of live theatre and well worth seeing, one could perhaps hope that it would evolve and be honed a little over time. At present, its denouement seems a little hurried, Lily’s final moments of reflection and acceptance a little too neatly packaged in pop psychology. Grief is never tidy, is it? While most of the play is faithful to this truth, the end slightly lets it down.
Kelleher, it’s worth mentioning, is by no means the only star of this one-woman show.
Stunningly simple and effective staging support Kelleher’s accomplished and confident performance admirably.
Davy Dummigan’s off-beat and ingenious set design sees six fittingly funereal lecterns of varying sizes furnish the centre of the stage: they conceal Kelleher’s props and give structure to the rooms and hallways she asks the audience to envision, and prove admirably versatile in the final scene of the play.
The rest of Kelleher’s team are every bit as good: lighting design courtesy of former photographer Steve Neale provides subtle but powerful decisive moments to accentuate the plot, and sound and video designer Cormac O’Connor adds some clever projected visuals and audio trickery to the mix.
Irene Kelleher’s Wake is at Cork Arts Theatre, as part of their 2022 Creative Empowerment programme of ten new works, until Saturday, April 2. Tickets and info here.