Theatre Review: The Heiress at the Gate Theatre, Dublin

3/5

Catherine Sloper (Karen McCartney) is heir to her dead mother’s fortune, and will inherit a good deal more from her father, Dr Sloper (Denis Conway). She’d be a prize wife for an eligible young New Yorker, except that, as far as her father is concerned, she has no other charms apart from being very rich. She is, in the words of Henry James, whose novel Washington Square is the basis for this 1947 adaptation by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, “a dull, plain girl”.

To her father, she is a cruel joke of fate: Having none of the beauty or talent of the mother who died in giving birth to her. And while Conway’s Dr Sloper has the egotism of a man who’s used to being right, his controlling impulse and his inability to forgive his daughter, or like her, are not cruel, but instead wounds he carries, undiagnosed.