TheatreReviewThe Print Room, LondonI was wrong about Brian Friel's play. Seeing it for the first time at the Almeida in 1994, I took it to be an arid replay of Friel's Faith Healer: again two men and a woman engage in monologues on the curative process. But although it is a play that asks whether seeing is to be equated with understanding, it also becomes, in Abigail Graham's incisive production, a play about a shared, profoundly Irish sense of exile.
Molly herself is a judge's daughter who, having been blind almost from birth and acquired a tactile apprehension of the world, is offered the chance to have her sight restored. What does she have to lose? She is flanked by two men who each has a vested interest in the operation. For her autodidact husband, Frank, Molly's cure seems to be the latest in a series of wild enthusiasms that include bees, whales and Iranian goats. And for Mr Rice, the once-celebrated eye surgeon whose wrecked marriage has driven him to the backwater of Ballybeg, the operation offers the chance to restore his self-esteem.
It is a play full of echoes, not least Synge's The Well of the Saints, in which a pair of blind beggars gratefully return to the sightless world after undergoing a miracle cure. And Friel, drawing on a study by Oliver Sacks, shows the terrors as well as the excitements of Molly's journey into partial sight. But the play is not a medical case history nor is it, as I first assumed, about the triumph of female interiority over male exploitativeness. It now strikes me that all three characters occupy a borderline country between reality and imagination. Molly explicitly says as much in her final soliloquy. But Frank turns out to be a nomadic escapist and Mr Rice a whiskey-drenched dreamer seeking a way out of his own "terrible darkness". The play is partly about the predicament of Molly. It is also, like all Friel's work, about the condition of Ireland.
While showing the characters locked into their private worlds, Graham's production gives the play more physical animation than I remember from Friel's original. In reminiscing about her sightless years, Dorothy Duffy's moving Molly scales a tree with rapturous ease. Stuart Graham admirably conveys the sombre restlessness of the fantasising surgeon and, in a throwaway phrase about once living in "a room above Kelly's cake shop", Ruairi Conaghan's Frank vividly evokes the restrictions of small-town Irish life. I was grateful for a production that enabled me to see Friel's fascinating play through fresh eyes.
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