The Separation

It’s interesting to think that just ten years ago divorce was illegal in Ireland. Sadly, that’s about the only thing that is interesting about ‘The Separation’. Richard Molloy’s exploration of a disintegrating family is clichéd and directionless.

Stephen Hanrahan is an editor and ‘gift of the gab’ man who’s schmoozed his way into the pants of junior newsroom reporters for years. Now he’s at it again with beautiful blonde Molly but his estranged wife and daughter put a spanner in the works.

Stephen dissolves from charmer to choker – he gets violent, somewhat out of the blue – in the manner of a great tragedian, but if this is a parable then it’s a poor one. What are we supposed to learn from his descent, other than that drink sometimes ruins and religion sometimes stifles? Tell us something we don’t know.

Molloy’s script is hackneyed. The tense interactions between father and daughter, lover and lover or ex-wife and ex-husband are seen-it-all before, and Simon Evans’s direction is frustratingly two-dimensional. Roxanna Nic Liam does a lovely job as sparky daughter Gerty and Owen McDonnell has sharp comic timing, but his shift into high-octane emotion feels melodramatic and Susan Stanley as Molly and Carrie Crowley as Stephen’s wife Marion seem uncomfortable in their own skins.

Amy Jane Cook’s workmanlike design neatly plays on voyeurism, with a wooden frame creating an almost ‘Rear Window’ feeling to the proceedings. But the design and staging of the entrances and exits to Stephen’s house, often with rudimentary shadow moments and badly recorded ‘knocks’, are clunky and start to grate.

Why write this play? It doesn’t illuminate anything about a deeply religious society that invidiously affects people’s lives. It doesn’t make for good domestic drama. In the end the only separation I wanted was myself from this production.