Grania review: Ella Lilly Hyland shines in revival of Lady Gregory's verbose play
Ella Lily Hyland and Lorcan Cranitch in Grania, at the Abbey for Dublin Theatre Festival. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
- Grania
- Abbey Theatre, Dublin Theatre Festival
- ★★★☆☆
Lady Gregory refused to allow this 1912 play of hers to be staged in her lifetime. She claimed a three-acter featuring just three actors would tax an audience’s patience. She may have been right. That is certainly a weakness in its first staging at the theatre Gregory herself co-founded. It’s a valiant effort from director Caitriona McLaughlin, however, one that almost overcomes the flaws of the verbose text, the stilted storytelling.
It seems equally likely Gregory’s reluctance to stage the play may have had a reason closer to her heart. The love triangle it portrays echoes the one she herself lived, in her own marriage to a much older man, and her adulterous affair with a younger one. Perhaps she poured too much of her own heart, emotions, and desires onto the page, could not bear such self-revelation on the stage, even if no-one could have guessed.
The autobiographical echoes are nonetheless the most intriguing thing here, with McLaughlin incorporating sections of A Woman’s Sonnets, Gregory’s direct poetic address to her lover, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. These come at interludes, sung by Sean Boylan and Lauran Sheeran, two wanderers in modern dress. Their popup tent by the waterside among the reeds is an obvious reference to the plight of Ireland’s contemporary displaced, but also a framing device that feels a tad forced.
In the familiar saga here, it’s Diarmuid and Grania who are reduced to wandering vagabonds. She is set to marry the aged Finn, still leader of the Fianna, but a diminished figure. Diarmuid (played by Niall Wright) is the young warrior that turns her head. And why not? He is by repute “the best lover of women in the whole world, and the most daring in war.” Some rep!
Ella Lilly Hyland is brilliant as a midlands-accented Grania. An ingenue, but boldly curious and articulate in what she wants to experience. “I think it might be a pleasing thing to have a lover that would go through fire for your sake,” she posits. The reply from Lorcan Cranitch’s weary Finn is perhaps not the one of her dream man: “I knew enough of the heat of love in my time, and am very glad to be done with it now.”
An overheard pledge of love sets the two off across Ireland, seven years passing until we see them at the start of the second act, in some kind of Arcadian scene. Both are naked. Diarmuid stage right, back to us, his spear poised as he fishes. Grania swims in a pool, but wearies of their life “always in the darkness of the woods”.
The denouement of their discovery by Finn casts male loyalty, duty and friendship against sexual love. Grania skewers it with frank assessments of her dilemma, evoking frequent laughter. This rather undercuts the drama however, lampooning the bond between Diarmuid and Finn, reducing them even as she becomes so fully realised. Then again, it is Grania’s play, after all, and Hyland’s incarnation of her deserves a more functional drama. She does not find it here, alas.
- Until October 26
