Theatre Review: Witness

Everyman, Cork

This intense, disturbing play about sexual abuse within a family is short, sharp and brutish. Written and directed by Carmel Winters, it is a retelling of her film, Snap. Kate Stanley Brennan’s performance is excellent; she seamlessly inhabits both the roles of Shannon and of her 14-year-old son, Stephen.

The dysfunction of this working class Dublin family is in-your-face. Shannon, pitted against a social worker, fears that the official has made her mind up about the case, before considering the facts.

Stephen apparently committed a terrible act that shocked the nation. He abducted a baby.

Shannon quotes one of the many newspaper headlines about the scandal: ‘The Face of Evil’ is one such example, describing her son. But Shannon wants to set the record straight and gives a public account of what really happened.

She says that what her son did was “bloody stupidity.” He spotted an unaccompanied toddler in a park and absconded with him. But Stephen thinks he did this child a favour, given that he could have been picked up by a molester.

However, the public and the media think the worst.

All Stephen wanted to do was to prove that, unlike a member of his family who had sexually abused him, he was not repeating history. Constantly told that he’s the spitting image of his perverted grandfather, Stephen took the child so that he could enact an experiment, proving that he was not a paedophile.

This premise is a contrived and unlikely. Why would a teenager think he could get away with running off with a little boy? Even allowing for his stupidity, he knows that what he did was high-risk.

At the heart of this play is a mother’s love for her son, a mother in denial about her past. The production is pared back to its essentials, with lighting design by Rob Moloney, who zones in on the characters, set against a blacked-out stage. But the sensational story doesn’t quite ring true.

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