The Saviour At Here For Now Theatre
Here For Now Theatre marks yet another artistic triumph with a searing production of Deirdre Kinahan’s The Saviour, featuring a tour-de-force performance by Rosemary Dunsmore.
Before The Saviour begins, we see the elements of Fiona Mongillo’s simple but ingenious set grouped together and covered by a sheet. A young man enters. He slowly, pensively creates a bedroom. He leaves and the play begins.
As The Saviour opens Máire Sullivan (Rosemary Dunsmore), a widow of mature years, is sitting up in bed full of girlish excitement and eager to share with Jesus, with whom she seems to have a close personal relationship, her great joy. A younger man, Martin, whom she met at church, has taken an interest in her and she has just enjoyed a night of uninhibited, even “acrobatic” sex with him. Surely Jesus can’t mind since it was He who brought Martin to her.
In her enthusiasm to fill Jesus in on how her relationship with Martin developed Máire recalls her childhood and the six horrible years she spent in a Magdalen laundry, essentially a torture house for “fallen women” and orphans. There, stripped of her name, called by a number, and forbidden to speak, she worked in unspeakable conditions, seeing other children drop dead and be casually carted off by the nuns, never to be mentioned again.
It was in this steam-filled charnel house, that she turned to Jesus who sustained her and was very much her personal saviour. Ever since then she has carried on a conversation with Jesus as she married, had children, grandchildren, and watched her husband descend into alcoholism and die.
Eventually Máire is puzzled as to why Martin is taking so long to bring up the coffee he has promised her. When she goes to investigate she finds, not Martin but the young man we saw at the beginning. It is her son Mel (Robert Gerow) come to visit on her birthday.
Mel brings unsettling news. He and Máire’s other children have grown suspicious of Martin and research conducted by Mel’s husband has revealed that, under a different name, he was convicted of child molestation.
Is he the saviour Máire thinks or a predator using her to gain access to her grandchildren?
During the 70 short minutes of The Saviour Rosemary Dunsmore must travel from the heights of innocent joy to the depths of existential despair. Along the way she unleashes a bout of blistering anger and withering disdain such as only an Irish mother could visit on a miscreant son.
Without makeup and wearing only a flimsy nightgown, Dunsmore delivers the most powerful performance you are likely to see in this or any other season. It is quite simply a personal and artistic triumph.
Once again I found myself puzzling over the tendency of the major theatre festivals to put their senior performers out to pasture when they have so much to offer. Of course, those venues, eagerly pursuing that illusive “younger audience,” are not programming material like The Saviour. But that’s another discussion.
For his part, Gerow delivers a quietly confident performance that makes manifest his love for his mum despite her homophobic insults.
Brenda Bazinet deserves the highest praise for directing with a sure but virtually invisible hand. The opening sequence in which Mel creates the set, suggests ever so subtly that The Saviour is a memory piece. It also evokes the duty a child owes to his parents, even the most difficult ones. It’s a lovely touch.
In his 2021 book, “We Didn’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958“, Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole charts the extraordinary transformation of Ireland during his lifetime from what was essentially a medieval theocracy to one of the most socially liberal countries one Europe, one that enabled Mel’s same-sex marriage.
In The Saviour, Irish playwright Kinahan is carrying on the difficult but vitally necessary task of helping her countrymen and women get to know their history. She does this by violently ripping off the veil that for too long blinded Ireland to the horrors visited on its most vulnerable children by the Roman Catholic hierarchy, which held an iron grip on every aspect of Irish life for much of the twentieth century.
If you’re lucky enough – although perhaps in this instance I should say unlucky enough – to be Irish, The Saviour may leave you feeling a bit like a gutted fish. But anyone who prizes great theatre and fine acting should make an effort to see this production. I suspect, however, that tickets to the intimate Here For Now tent will be hard to come by, which is as it should be.
Perhaps, like Here For Now’s equally devastating production of Girls & Boys in 2021, The Saviour will find a Toronto venue for another too short run.
The Saviour continues at the Here For Now Theatre’s sylvan tent behind the Stratford-Perth Museum through August 16, 2024. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Here For Now Theatre website.
[image: Here For Now Theatre; artwork by Mark Uhre]
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