When hurt is a deep twisted pain
Two award winners combine to pack a punch, says Emer O’Kelly
Nothing But a Toerag Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin
IT’S not often you see what amounts to an almost unfair collection of talent on a stage. But it’s the only way to describe Nothing But a Toerag, at Bewley’s lunchtime theatre in Dublin.
It’s written by Aisling O’Meara, an award winner during her acting student days at the Lir. She plays in it with Clare Monnelly, who has won awards for both acting and writing. You’d expect the play and the actors to pack a punch; and they do.
The play is set in an institution, possibly a prison; maybe a criminal mental facility.
Bianca is a new arrival, carrying her pitiful little box of personal effects as she is immediately interrogated by the aggressive inmate already there. The latter tells Bianca that she can call her “A” to match the Bianca’s “B”. Her coiled energy, passive-aggressive and teasing by turns, reflects the curtailment of liberty to which Bianca too is going to have to accustom herself. There are to be no secrets here if they’re to be “friends”.
But there are always secrets; and Bianca has more than most.
There seems initially a reluctant acceptance of the need for intimacy as the young women share the limited white space which they seem almost to blend into in their grey jumpsuits and white trainers, their hair tidied into the imposed childishness of pigtails.
This is a place where the real world with all its jarring colours and emotions is in their heads, a virtual concept outside the institutional reality of their incarceration.
Over the weeks and months, Bianca does confide: she lived with her mother and her 12-year-old niece. Her father “wasn’t there”. Dead? It would seem so. And from her initial obsession with privacy, and also with bodily integrity that makes her use tampons all the time, she seems to let her guard down.
Small gestures of generosity have helped: a gift of a shiny un-opened packet of sweets for A. The gift is returned in a birthday gift: A has choreographed a dance to Bianca’s favourite song, and performs it, Bianca joining in almost reluctantly. But A’s incessant curiosity is just too much: there are limits to the actuality of truth, and sometimes it must be invented… or suppressed because in a virtual world actual truth assumes an even greater horror, its pain offering the destruction of an avalanche.
And as I write this, another play comes to mind from long ago: Brian Friel wrote of such pain in The Loves of Cass Maguire, as the inhabitants of an old people’s home gradually succumb to the closing in of the world; a chair becomes the world where they can tell a story that concludes “This is My Truth”.
Nothing But a Toerag is, dare I say it, more complex, its tragedy excoriating horror rather than mundane loneliness. A (who may be in Bianca’s head) doesn’t want to invent a truth, merely destroy the depth of its horror. But in both plays, the mind is a battlefield.
And Aisling O’Meara has done a remarkable job of constructing a pool into which misery seeps: until the only way to avoid drowning is to reach out for the waiting hand of truth. Nothing But a Toerag is about our self-imposed darkness when the world becomes too much, and guilt closes in. Bianca feels that she is nothing but a toerag. The world thinks the same of her, she thinks and believes. But the truth is far different, far darker in fact.
O’Meara (Bianca) and Monnelly (A) turn in performances that range from belligerent to wistful, but are always heart-wrenchingly convincing. It’s all helped by a gutsy self-aware humour that highlights the serious reality of the piece, which is directed with great sensitivity by Amilia Keating in a design by Ellen Kirk, lit by John Gunning and Shane Gill.
It deserves to run and run.