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Birthright (written by Nadine Flynn) promised to deconstruct power and privilege while challenging the representation of working class Dubliners on stage. It promised to ask “what happens when their catchy colloquialisms and unforgiving audacity are no longer funny?”
Within the intimate space of Boys’ School at Smock Alley, just three rows of audience were privy to a sunken stage. The first scene opened to two members of the three person cast: Mother (Sorcha Furlong) and Daughter (Cara Christie) who we found clad in dressing gowns and slippers, on the chequered floor of their kitchen, bickering and laughing, their hands sifting through a pile of laundry. Their ease with one another, their ‘naturalness’ was instantly disarming. I had just come from an improv rehearsal – where spontaneity and honesty are stock and trade, but Mother and Daughter outdid even that candour. They provided that rare thing of appearing so unlike actors, but as real people, life unfolding around them. Their ease made it gorgeous to watch them.
Mother knew the audience liked to watch her – and she played up to us, referring to us openly with a wave of her hand as ‘they’, and intensifying her North Dublin working-class accent over certain words (‘bastards’ became ‘baaastaaards’) to elicit greater laughter. A speaker on the corner of the stage provided laughter at these junctures – reminiscent of waves of off-camera sit-com titters. But if truth be told, the audience in-situ didn’t need these cues. They were used to laughing with and at the kind of jokes Mother made.
But soon a central fact to the play was revealed. The women weren’t folding laundry – but sorting through the possessions of a seven-year-old boy. The boy had just died – he’d been killed in a hit-and-run accident, knocked down by a getaway driver. The women were in dressing gowns because they were waiting to dress for the funeral of their respective son and brother. Then, around this central fact – of death – the play’s central tension took form. Mother refused to mourn her son, while Daughter wanted her to speak and talk through her grief to weather the trauma together.
As mother’s extreme deferral of grief developed, the audience saw her wrap presents for her son’s eighth birthday, plan a party, blow up balloons, order cake – in short she continued humouring us, her audience. She attended dutifully to Dooley (Finbarr Doyle), a wide-vowelled, obsequious South-sider priest (recently converted to humanism). Dooley acted as the middle classes’ representative on stage. It was for him that mother kept her grief suppressed, maintaining her sunny-disposition for his comfort. But Daughter provided a jarring counterpoint, refusing to accommodate him. In the context of plot, this disagreement drove a wedge between the women – Daughter cannot understand her mother’s refusal to grieve. It is here that the play makes its greatest point. In a desperate rush of words, which might be described as ‘the transfer of wisdom’ Mother explains herself to Daughter. Her bizarre refusal to mourn isn’t actually a refusal – it’s that as a working class Dubliner, she doesn’t have the right to: “If you don’t fit in, you cease to exist…they don’t want to hear how we suffer”. It becomes apparent that Mother’s buoyancy is forced- for us – the audience, with our amused, our greedy, our entitled middle-class gaze.
The final scene sees the intrusion of the middle-class confronted: Dooley (toadily pathetic and self-pitying) confesses to Daughter that it was he who knocked the child down. Yet he seeks forgiveness. It is this final requirement, defined by self-importance and superiority, that leads to confrontation. Mother, who overhears his confession, charges for him. Raging, she accosts him and unplugs the laughter-box speaker – it whizzes and spews while the stage lights go out. No longer will Mother perform for us.
I said that at the beginning, Mother and Daughter’s ease and apparent naturalness, made it gorgeous to watch them. But from Birthright, I learned that when a spectator is present, even the most natural-seeming of performances, are still performances. I knew about the male gaze, the white gaze, the heterogaze – but I hadn’t considered Dublin’s classist gaze until now. Birthright was moving and brilliantly engineered in one short but searing act. A reminder that adherence to a tightly woven form can still be very exciting, surprising – and the neatest way to deliver home truths.
