There is something dreadfully familiar about Anthony Morris’s earliest memory of education: his inability to translate into Irish the need to use the toilet and the inevitable and humiliating outcome of such a failure. But being one of thirteen children born and schooled in rural Ireland during the 1960s, there are ample grievances to air, naturally.
Bordering on the back-in-the-day humdrum of ill-fitting hand-me-downs and over-populated sleeping quarters, this 50-minute memory monologue is accompanied by Róisín Morris’s photographic projections onto the back wall, putting faces to names and (fundamentally) providing pictorial cues to Anthony’s successive reminiscences. Despite Róisín’s onstage presence, as she operates a laptop, her interjecting utterances here and there assume a strangely extraneous quality throughout, weakening the final impact of her joining Anthony for an accelerating recital of their family members’ names.
The more interesting moments in the play lie in its passing references to their father Paddy’s identificaiton of the theatre as a place where it was possible to ‘act’ happy. But the somewhat stagnant narrative seems a little too dependent on a role-reversing reprise of the opening theme, where Paddy, rendered helpless by Alzheimer’s Disease, now becomes dependent on his son to change him.