‘Something will break in me if I say his name,’ the Woman at the centre of Colm Tóibín’s monologue play says of her murdered son. The fact of who she is materializes in front of us as eerily as she has at the start of the play, as a shadow cast in the corner of the stage. But by time the picture she paints comes into focus, it seems as if it should have been clear all along: she is the widowed mother of a famous son who has been known to cure the sick and raise the dead. If this isn’t enough, the other familiar players in the well-worn story are named without hesitation: Lazarus, Mary, Martha. But while the markers of Gospel truth are laid out, the landscape they define here is alien and unsettling.

The disorientation is immediate. The Project Space Upstairs is transformed and boxed in, with the audience being led in over a tight, meandering, sand-covered path, emerging through a door centre stage to take their seats. Hanging over the seats, stifling and membrane-like, is a yellowed canvass sheet extending over the entirety of the space. Francis O’Connor’s design is tight, sparse and controlled, with its stucco walls recalling the cracking, plastered walls of a fabled Connemara cottage. The minimal contents of the space belie this, though, with fluted clay jugs suggesting a locale much farther east than Connaught. Designer Peter Mumford’s floor level lighting picks out the warped and worn texture of O’Connor’s set perfectly. The cover above pulls back to reveal a projection screen that illuminates images of a vast and changeable sky, under which Mullen stalks the stage, cloaked in blacks and greys that echo the traditional garb of Irish ritual mourning. Mullen’s Mother Mary may speak of times and places long since past, but their connection to Irish cultural and religious identity are made unmistakable.

That the Woman never refers to herself or her son by name is indicative of her ultimate rejection of the official narrative and her fixed place in it. The play opens with her bolting the door against two disciples writing what will become the sanctioned version of her son’s death, like two celebrity biographers plumbing her for all the juicy bits and manipulating the material to suit their own ideological ends. As she recalls the events leading up to his execution, she proves suspicious of the movement her son’s teachings have spawned and ambivalent to his status as a revolutionary figure. His rejection of her as she tries to warn him of the dangers of his rabble rousing fuels a growing resentment at being dragged into the birth of a new world she wants no part of.

Mullen handles the richness of Tóibín’s language with a forceful delivery that falters only occasionally when it seems a line or two has escaped her. These moments of hesitation stick out with particular prominence only because Mullen’s presence is usually assured and grounded. The richness of Tóibín’s prose translates fittingly into performance, with the flowing cadences of his writing suggesting a natural theatricality. Mullen’s measured, textured performance resonates in a number of affecting emotional registers, filtering this complexity of feeling through a deliberately strained physicality. Director Garry Hynes signals the breaks in Tóibín’s text with what appear to be fairly arbitrary shifts in light and space, moving Mullen about the stage without an organic motive to propel her. While O’Connor’s space evokes the appropriate sense of suffocation, this leaves the performer and the director little space to work with in terms of staging. Likewise, lighting cues seem to catch Mullen in the wrong spot at the wrong time, adding to the sense that perhaps a more paired down aesthetic that focused on the just the performer and the text would have served the production better. Interesting and evocative as it is, the design and direction seems not to trust in total the simple power and skill of a stirring performer and provocative writer to tell a story on their own.

Regardless, Tóibín’s character portrait is a well-considered refutation of the flat and depthless figure that the Church claims as the ideal symbol of womanhood. The Mary presented here is all too human, caving to the instinct to run when her son’s movement is compromised, and willing to embrace the comfort and complexity of a pantheistic view of the world while in the midst of self-exile. In short, Tóibín’s Mary is portrayed here as the first heretic, but in the face of a growing fanaticism, this heresy seems the only reasonable path to choose.

Jesse Weaver was recently awarded a PhD in Theatre Studies from UCC, and is a playwright.