Get us in your inbox

Search
'Lippy'
Jeremy Abrahams'Lippy'

Lippy review

Traverse Theatre

Advertising

Bush Moukarzel and Mark O’Halloran’s ‘Lippy’ is an extraordinary and challenging piece of theatre that will probably infuriate as many people as it moves. But I loved this Irish production’s strange, sinister odyssey to the outskirts of human comprehension.

Moukarzel and Ben Kidd’s production begins as a rather good, fairly straightforward comedy. A performance of an unnamed play has just ended and a post-show Q&A is about to start, hosted by Moukarzel, playing himself as a dim, oleaginous self-parody.

On comes veteran Irish actor Daniel Reardon (again, as a fictional version of himself) who is subjected to a titteringly unprofessional interview from Moukarzel, who is childishly fixated with the fact that Reardon is able to lip read.

During the interview, Reardon both demonstrates the inexactitude of lip reading (because many words involve the same mouth shapes) and reveals that he occasionally uses the skill to help the police read CCTV recordings, and that a recent case had been attempting to decipher the last footage of the Mulrooneys, three middle-aged woman and their aunt who starved themselves to death in Leixlip, co Kildare in 2000. He says there was going to be a play about them, but it was not made. Moukarzel is uninterested.

Then everything we thought ‘Lippy’ was is ripped apart, as deafening roars of noise break out and the set splits opens to reveal the four woman, eerily, ritualistically living out their self-confinement in the long week before their starvation. It is creepy, suggestive, non-linear and deeply surreal, with Reardon still flitting around as a character, reflecting the immense and futile task set to him by the police – to try and explain what happened to these women based on a silent CCTV conversation between two of them.

It is, I think, a play about unknowns,about the fact that some things about the world will remain forever sealed off from us, out of reach. The playwrights draw upon a poetic note that one of the sisters, Ruth, sent to a friend a couple of days before death, but they never attempt to fully explain or create a straight narrative. The Mulrooneys are an unknowable people, locked inaccessibly in time. This strange, visceral play isn’t an explanation of their mystery, more a monument to it.

By Andrzej Lukowski

The latest Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews

Pioneer review
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama

It's probably written down somewhere in an old dusty book of Edinburgh Fringe Rules that staging a big-scale sci-fi thriller with a complex set is Not Advisable. Science-focussed theatre company Curious Directive have clearly ignored all the rules.

Read the review

Advertising
Little on the Inside review
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama

How do you escape the same four walls, when they're all you have to look at for the next 20 years? Alice Birch’s two hander play ‘Little on the Inside’ has the answer: with your imagination.

Read the review

Early Doors review
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama

Pint after breakfast anyone? Noon may sound a little early to be drinking, but you’d feel out of place if you didn’t join in with the regulars during this play staged in a small Edinburgh boozer.

Read the review

Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Nothing review
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama

Struggling to find work, bored, angry and obsessed with technology and sex: a bunch of today’s Generation Y speak to us in this series of monologues.

Read the review

Recommended
    You may also like
    You may also like
    Bestselling Time Out offers
      Advertising