Lippy is told backwards. We begin at the end — even after the end — with a post-show Q&A from director Bush Moukarzel and actor David Heap. Immediately, the play is self-aware. Its allegiance is not to the telling of a story but to the question of how to tell it, if it can be told at all.

The story deals with the real-life suicide pact of four women from Leixlip. At the turn of the millennium, three sisters and their elderly aunt barred the doors to their house and starved themselves to death. Heap plays a lip-reader, however, the practice of lip-reading is shown to be an inexact art when a disingenuous Moukarzel (playing himself) requests to be interpreted. The Q&A morphs into an exhibition of echoing voices, framing the misinterpretation and misrepresentation that pervades much of the play. We cannot know why these women acted in the way they did, so co-directors Ben Kidd and Moukarzel do not attempt to represent them, but rather the futility of doing so.

Accordingly, when we fast forward (or rewind) to the women on stage, the experience is confounding and chaotic. In a hauntingly monastic dance, figures in white crime scene suits draw the outlines of the dead women. However, continuing the reverse narrative, the four women then emerge from the suits. The identity of these characters is not fixed. From here some fascinating and heavy themes are touched on — the last supper, hunger, the angelic female — however they are never allowed to take flight. Instead, the play references Beckett’s Not I with its final scene — a large projection of only a woman’s mouth written by “cameo playwright” Mark O’Halloran.

Yet the subject matter of Lippy does not share the sparsity of Beckett. The staging, lighting, acting, musical effects, multi-directional narrative are all ambitious and very clever, only they obscure the women who inspired the play. This may well be the intention, however for a story with so much potential, to keep returning to the pointlessness of it all seems like a missed opportunity.

Lippy runs at The Abbey on the Peacock stage until February 14.