Terminus : The Abbey Theatre at ArtsEmerson (Boston)

L.to R. Catherine Walker, Declan Conlon, Olwen Fouéré in Terminus

The Abbey Theatre’s production of Mark O’Rowe’s extraordinary Terminus is the final work of ArtsEmerson’s mini-Irish festival. (The other two were Kathrine Bates’ The Color of Rose and Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan.) Terminus is formally constructed: three characters – two women and a man – speaking monologues in verse, much of it rhyming. It observes the unities of time, place, and action: the tale they tell transpired over a single night, they remain in one place throughout, and the action is simply to recount.

Formalism is carried through in the design. The set consists of a blue wooden frame. Mirror shards extend from it, suggesting a recent explosion, an impression reinforced by the steadily increasing throbbing sounds heard as the house lights go down. Irregularly shaped, raked platforms – one for each actor – are set within the frame. A, B, and C – as they are called – are unaware of each other and speak only when a spotlight focuses on them. Most of the stage is enveloped in darkness and smoke.

Their stories, however, are perverse, intricate, violent, and fantastical. A (Olwen Fouéré), a middle-aged woman, undertakes a journey through the depths of Dublin “hell-bent” to rescue Helen, a pregnant girl. A is almost killed by the sadistic Celine, Helen’s lesbian lover. We discover that the rescue was A’s attempt to atone for betraying her own daughter, now estranged.

As the light goes down on A, B (Catherine Walker) begins her own story. The only innocent of the characters, she lives a lonely and dull life, her consolation, the television, which gives her “the illusion of presence through voices.” To break the routine, she goes to a pub where she meets her best friend, her friend’s husband and another man. Attracted by the man, she willingly goes with them to a crane that they all climb as part of an adventure. She discovers that she has been set up when the friend’s husband tries to violate her. She falls, closes her eyes and waits in terror to hit the ground. Instead, she finds herself floating in the arms of a demon, composed of worms.

C (Declan Conlon), the third to speak, is a preternaturally shy psychopath who sold his soul to the devil for a beautiful singing voice in order to entice women. Enraged, when he discovers he is too shy to sing publicly, he goes on a killing spree. Despite his viciousness, C provides comic relief, which derives from his overweening narcissism.

Terminus, is at once strikingly original and reminiscent of several twentieth-century works. It recalls Samuel Beckett’s absurdist one-act Play, in which three dead people –W1, W2, and M – buried in urns, their speech controlled by a spotlight, recount their lives in monologue form. The gratuitous brutality evokes Edward Bond’s naturalistic Saved. But, its closest ancestor may be James Joyce’s Ulysses in Nighttown in which characters wander through Dublin, encountering its low-life and undergoing ghastly hallucinatory visions.

And while O’Rowe may not have the linguistic genius of Joyce, he too experiments with a language of musicality. To great effect, he combines idiomatic, slangy, obscene, and lyrical language, at times with the pulsing beat of rap, at others with the rhythms of Irish speech. “And I want to dispute the point, to persuade her to relent, to scold her and chide her. Instead I just hold her, seeing only the woe that’s about to betide her …”

This is theatre to be heard and the actors’ superb vocal skills more than meet the challenge of making the formalistic and idiosyncratic language comprehensible, alive, and moving. Directed by the playwright, it is a very taut, yet mesmerizing, performance, which begins low and builds to emotional heights. Catherine Walker is particularly poignant as the betrayed daughter and friend who briefly finds intense love and joy in the embrace of the wormy demon, C’s bartered soul. For through the characters’ interwoven monologues, we learn that their lives interlinked.

Reviewed by Jane Baldwin

February 13, 2011 (Boston, Massachusetts)

Terminus

Written and Directed by Mark O’Rowe

Set and Costumes designed by Jon Bausor

Lighting Design by Philip Gladwell

Sound Design by Philip Stewart

The Abbey Theatre at ArtsEmerson (Boston)

CAST

A – Olwen Fouéré

B – Catherine Walker

C – Declan Conlon