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The Bird Sanctuary
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Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2 Shepperton Rd, N1 3DT
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Rating:
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- Even the most hard-nosed of people can get sentimental when it comes to their own childhood. Artist Eleanor has spent three years eluding her relatives while she tries to capture the now dilapidated family home – overlooking Booterstown Bird Sanctuary – on canvas. But her peace is disturbed when younger sister Marianne discovers her husband is cheating and returns to Dublin to call in her share of the past.
Frank McGuinness’s play is brilliant, suggesting a competitive side to sentimentality while unlocking its characters’ true hearts through flights of magical realism, bursts of song and rivers of booze. And in this tight, compulsive production from director Lisa Smith, we don’t miss a beat of the caustic humour or the emotional gestures so often going on beneath.
Margaret Moore’s Marianne is radiantly and intimidatingly assured, calmly accepting both her husband’s adultery and the extreme measures she must take to get him back. Claire Kissane’s Eleanor is a mystical outsider whose chief mode is earthy sarcasm, practising her witchcraft with the remains of a roast dinner. Fiona Cuskelly is funny and touching as their sister-in-law Tina, an archetypal Irishwoman whose slamming of trays and scrubbing of ovens accompanies a quieter struggle to accept her son’s homosexuality.
On a small stage dominated by Eleanor’s canvases, what the cast capture best is the sense of a family who, for all their squabbles and skeletons, know each other’s personalities inside out.
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Details
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Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2 Shepperton Rd, N1 3DT
- 020 7704 6665
- Category: Fringe
- Times: Tue-Fri 7.30pm, Sat 7pm, Sun 5pm
- Price: £12, concs £8
- Tube: Old Street
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2 comments
W. Kehoe should have stuck around for the second act. IIt was a worthwhile production.
truly aweful. Ham acting and melodramatic rubbish. First time I ever left at the interval