Orphans

Danny and Helen are having a quiet dinner at home when her brother Liam appears, covered in blood. The explanation is innocent – he had helped a wounded man in the street. But it takes so long to come out, since none of these three people are very good at sustaining a thought long enough to complete a sentence, that they keep getting sidetracked into digressions, some of which open emotional minefields of their own, which they then have to struggle to focus on and address. And then it appears that the bloody encounter wasn't all that innocent after all.

Dennis Kelly's play is about the mad world and disintegrating social order that waits just outside the doors of modern urban dwellers, and about what happens when it passes the threshold and comes inside. It is about discovering how very fragile one's own confidence in not being a sociopath can become, and how difficult it is to sustain relationships of any sort in such a world, especially when these call for mental and emotional processes which have not previously been so tested. And, in an odd way, it is frequently quite funny.

Among the questions the play raises and makes dramatically real is whether it is still possible to say, I'm not the sort of person who would do that, when you have just done the thing in question. And if that does make you the sort of person who would do that, then what happens to all the other things in your life that you have built on the assumption that you weren't?

Kelly's play may have one or two too many plot twists along the way, sometimes threatening to push it into soap opera territory, and the ending may be a bit rushed and undeveloped, but it is always engrossing to watch and to mull over afterwards. Under director Roxana Silbert's guidance, Claire-Louise Cordwell as Helen trying desperately to keep her hold on a crumbling reality, Jonathan McGuinness as Danny learning things about himself no one should have to, and especially Joe Armstrong as Liam with a troubled soul and a mental ability inadequate to deal with it all give impeccable performances.