The Remains of Maisie Duggan is currently showing at the Abbey Theatre. Theatre editors Amelia McConville and Amyrose Forder spoke to actress Rachel O’Byrne, who plays Kathleen, about the show.
Can you tell us more about this show?
The Remains of Maisie Duggan is, I suppose, an Irish family drama, that is set – as all great Irish family dramas are – in a kitchen in rural Ireland! It’s about Maisie, the matriarch of the family, who is under the very firm illusion that she is dead following an accident that occurred six weeks before the beginning of the play. I’m playing her daughter, Kathleen, so I get word that she is dead and so come home expecting to find my dead mother, or that I’ve missed the funeral, but she is alive… The reasons that Kathleen ran away to London 20 years ago all come out, and there’s a massive reckoning among all the family.
It sounds like quite a familiar template for an Irish drama. Is there anything in particular that puts a little hook on it? Apart from the corpse coming back to life!
That’s something that the audience finds massively enjoyable – Bríd [Ní Neachtain] plays her so beautifully and delicately. It’s really very darkly funny, there is a lot of humour to be found. Carmel doesn’t shy away from the darkness of it at all. Ultimately, what it’s about is love and the way that we as a nation, and as human beings often have serious problems expressing love in a loving way. It’s about how we hurt the people we love.
Is Carmel [Winters] involved in this production at all?
Yeah, when I was auditioning she was there and working with me in the actual audition. It was great to get feedback from her. Generally for the rehearsals she was away, because I think she kind of feels like the play needs a chance to stand up on its own. if the writer is in the room, explaining to you, it can feel like “if they need me to explain it, maybe I haven’t done a good enough job.” From when we were in The Abbey, she was here all the time and working on the cutting. That’s the exciting thing about working on a new play, up until the very last minute there are changes happening to the play – massive big changes which are difficult for you to get your head around – but exciting, and always for the benefit of the play. I loved the script from the first time I read it. It’s massively beneficial [as a performer] to have all of the backstory that was included in the earlier drafts, but it is majorly beneficial to the play to get it to the point it is now.
With Kathleen, your character, do you feel there are any characters from Irish theatrical history that you might be channelling?
Yes, she is female in the tradition that all Irish females adore playing, but she is also quite different to anything I’ve ever played in terms of her self-identity or lack thereof, her lack of self-respect and her inability to identify and engage with other people. The core relationship of her life is with her girlfriend Dottie but she has failed in that relationship, she’s different because she has inherited the violence of her family, the emotional violence, physical violence – every sort of violence – and so she can’t function in any kind of relationship. And I think it is unique to see a female character who is physically violent. That was something very different from me, I’m loving it. It’s great to get to play it. But it is something you don’t see a lot of on the Irish stage, on any stage: women who are violent towards other women, towards other men, towards anybody.
There’s an element of an ‘Irish guilt’ complex to do with the mother-daughter relationship then?
Yeah, this is behaviour that she has learned from her father.The father-daughter relationship is what struck me the first time I read the play. There is this incredible, classic bond between the two of them. She has become him, in a way. She has learned all her behaviours from him, unconsciously. There are all these really interesting layers of relationships between her mother and father, and also the parallels between her mother and her girlfriend – it’s very cyclical, layered and dense.
Do you think this play makes an attempt to break with the Irish canon?
Yeah, I think it is definitely a very modern play. The things that it’s talking about are certainly of now and are things we mightn’t have been talking about … even yesterday I was listening to Carmel talking about the relationship between Kathleen and her girlfriend Dottie and as a representation of a lesbian relationship that is not this sort of ideal beacon or focus. She comes out in the play, but she comes out in the play in order to get to the main point of the story. Also, the relationship between them is not represented by this kind of beacon of loving goodness; it’s represented as a real relationship. It’s not a good relationship, which I think, when we were struggling for equality last year, because there was opposition it was more difficult to represent a real relationship as opposed to this ideal of ‘oh so in love’. So I definitely think it’s a very modern play and it’s taking the themes that have been prevalent in Irish theatre and in Irish life in perpetuam and it is advancing them.
Tell us about the staging?
I have described the set, lighting and costumes as an assault on the senses, particularly for playing in and for the audience. The stage is set back so you have to lean in to engage with it. It’s like looking into a letter box, it’s long and narrow. The floor is earth, it’s mucky and smells like muck and the lighting is beautiful but it’s all lit really low, so when you’re playing it’s in your face all the time and is really, for me, it helps me to feel quite oppressed and uncomfortable in that atmosphere. It is quite claustrophobic, it is quite an uncomfortable experience for the audience, but the play itself is not comfortable.
Regarding the sound design, is there music in the show?
There isn’t music; but there is a beautiful sound design by Alex Braithwaite, which adds to it, there are lots of feedback and machine sounds – a sort of soundscape. And again, it is slightly lifted out of reality which all adds to it. Technically it is a beautiful show.
How did Carmel [Winters] react to the play?
Yeah she’s seen it and she’s really excited by it. She came in after our first preview and she said “the play is speaking to people” – that was delighting her that it was communicating with people. I’m sure it’s a very vulnerablising moment – if that’s a word – to give your play over. Well I know it is, from having experienced it and especially a new piece like this. It’s always the same, no matter what play, but especially with a new piece like this – it’s a very delicate moment and I think she’s delighted with it.
Is there a sense of hope in the show? Does it end on a redemptive note or is it more explorative of darkness?
It does. I think the point that it gets to is the breaking point. I mentioned the cyclical nature of it, and that is the question of the play: can you break the cycle? The cycle gets broken, but the question is where do you go from there? Because what happens to Kathleen is that because she grew up under such an oppressive patriarch, even when she ran away as a young child, it has always beenn on her back and so she has lived her whole life not developing herself. So it gets to the point where this cycle is broken in order that she can begin to become herself, but who is that?
The Remains of Maisie Duggan by Carmel Winters runs until 29th October in the Abbey Theatre.
Tickets can be booked online here
