ALSO PLAYING
Lippy (Peacock, until Feb 14) first performed in 2013, is based on the story of an aunt and her three nieces, found in their house in Leixlip in July 2000, having apparently starved themselves to death. The one clue was a letter mentioning that ‘there can never be justice here … every soul has a karmic debt to pay’.
Using a deliberately selfconscious theatricality, the play’s theme is that there is no forensic solution to some mysteries and that words often obscure the issue.
The first, overlong, section introduces lip reading as a metaphor for our efforts to understand what can’t be understood. Then we move to the house in Leixlip where the women, a mixture of spirit and flesh, wander in eerie choreography preparing for death.
The show is cleverly constructed and beautifully played, but you’re constantly reminded it’s a theatrical construct, incapable of providing a solution.
The long final speech tries to make sense of it all, but it’s such an obviously deliberate, alienating copy of Beckett’s play Not I, that it, too, undermines what it’s saying.