THE SETTLING
by Gavin McEnteeBrokenCrow in association with The Everyman and Cork Midsummer Festival
Fantasy and reality blend in this new play about an old man, caught in the recesses of his mind as actions long buried climb to the surface.
In the silence he heard soft footsteps. A girl stands in his doorway. A sneeze, a sigh, and ...“Tell me a story”. In a collapsed cottage Old Man and Little Girl spend their days eating tinned pears, telling stories, and digging holes. Old Man is reckoning with his past. His daily functioning relies on the companionship of the mysterious child, but their fragile co-existence is fractured when the weight of his past comes to bear. Exploring the personal and mental consequences of complicity, enter Gavin McEntee’s world between reality and imagination - and see what happens when we must finally bear the weight of our actions.
Writer Gavin McEntee
Director Deirdre Dwyer
Cast Raymond Keane, Katie Honan, George Hanover
Set Design Deirdre Dwyer
Lighting Design Sarah Jane Shiels
Sound Design Kevin Terry
Costume Design Jessica Healy-Rettig
Supported by the Arts Council and Cork City Council, with further support from The Everyman, Cork Midsummer Festival and Garter Lane Arts Centre
by Gavin McEnteeBrokenCrow in association with The Everyman and Cork Midsummer Festival
Fantasy and reality blend in this new play about an old man, caught in the recesses of his mind as actions long buried climb to the surface.
In the silence he heard soft footsteps. A girl stands in his doorway. A sneeze, a sigh, and ...“Tell me a story”. In a collapsed cottage Old Man and Little Girl spend their days eating tinned pears, telling stories, and digging holes. Old Man is reckoning with his past. His daily functioning relies on the companionship of the mysterious child, but their fragile co-existence is fractured when the weight of his past comes to bear. Exploring the personal and mental consequences of complicity, enter Gavin McEntee’s world between reality and imagination - and see what happens when we must finally bear the weight of our actions.
Writer Gavin McEntee
Director Deirdre Dwyer
Cast Raymond Keane, Katie Honan, George Hanover
Set Design Deirdre Dwyer
Lighting Design Sarah Jane Shiels
Sound Design Kevin Terry
Costume Design Jessica Healy-Rettig
Supported by the Arts Council and Cork City Council, with further support from The Everyman, Cork Midsummer Festival and Garter Lane Arts Centre
Review of The Settling - Irish Times
Mary Leland
Tue Jun 20 2023 - 11:51
The title of The Settling (★★★★☆), by Gavin McEntee, which gets its world premiere at the Granary, suggests something arranged or concluded. Yet at the apparent conclusion of this startlingly energetic play nothing is decided, in that there is a sense of continuance rather than of finality. Because the physical agility of Raymond Keane as A Man and Katie Honan as A Girl is so remarkable, and so remarkably related to their flow of conversation, that the attention needed to decode what they are saying or referencing to one another is deflected. Then a linkage emerges between the dots, at least until the dots resemble something more like a cat’s cradle than a map.
Delivered with a necessary ballast of comic wit, this web of words involves great skill in the writing and in the speaking; gradually the metaphoric weight of the play comes closer to the surface, helped by the frantic set from Deirdre Dwyer – who also directs – and the lighting design by Sarah Jane Shiels. Man and Girl exist in a symbiosis both toxic and sustaining, he in a tenement-like bedroom and she hiding in a rubbish bin when not digging what may be a grave in the carpet.
His family want to sell the building; he cowers at the sight of a document presented by the woman who visits to feed and wash him and to change the sheets. What will be revealed if the builders move in? Does the girl exist at all? Or perhaps she has done and is now a slight but talkative ghost of other slight young ghosts before her. Honan gives her a fluent presence to lighten, or perhaps occasionally to darken, Keane’s two-thirds-demented life.
The power of insinuation is McEntee’s great talent. The implications multiply or dissolve in a cascade of possibilities, small and personally tragic, large and nationally cataclysmic. The velocity of the dialogue hides the clues in its pauses: was another little girl here? Is she fairy or a baby banshee? Has he told the wrong story after all their stories? Although the suggestion of a resolution through reclaimed motherhood and loss is not convincing despite George Hanover’s grieving monologue, there is so much to excavate through banter, wordplay, song and sadness that one exits this BrokenCrow production, which is staged in association with the Everyman and Cork Midsummer Festival, captivated and definitely unsettled.
Mary Leland
Tue Jun 20 2023 - 11:51
The title of The Settling (★★★★☆), by Gavin McEntee, which gets its world premiere at the Granary, suggests something arranged or concluded. Yet at the apparent conclusion of this startlingly energetic play nothing is decided, in that there is a sense of continuance rather than of finality. Because the physical agility of Raymond Keane as A Man and Katie Honan as A Girl is so remarkable, and so remarkably related to their flow of conversation, that the attention needed to decode what they are saying or referencing to one another is deflected. Then a linkage emerges between the dots, at least until the dots resemble something more like a cat’s cradle than a map.
Delivered with a necessary ballast of comic wit, this web of words involves great skill in the writing and in the speaking; gradually the metaphoric weight of the play comes closer to the surface, helped by the frantic set from Deirdre Dwyer – who also directs – and the lighting design by Sarah Jane Shiels. Man and Girl exist in a symbiosis both toxic and sustaining, he in a tenement-like bedroom and she hiding in a rubbish bin when not digging what may be a grave in the carpet.
His family want to sell the building; he cowers at the sight of a document presented by the woman who visits to feed and wash him and to change the sheets. What will be revealed if the builders move in? Does the girl exist at all? Or perhaps she has done and is now a slight but talkative ghost of other slight young ghosts before her. Honan gives her a fluent presence to lighten, or perhaps occasionally to darken, Keane’s two-thirds-demented life.
The power of insinuation is McEntee’s great talent. The implications multiply or dissolve in a cascade of possibilities, small and personally tragic, large and nationally cataclysmic. The velocity of the dialogue hides the clues in its pauses: was another little girl here? Is she fairy or a baby banshee? Has he told the wrong story after all their stories? Although the suggestion of a resolution through reclaimed motherhood and loss is not convincing despite George Hanover’s grieving monologue, there is so much to excavate through banter, wordplay, song and sadness that one exits this BrokenCrow production, which is staged in association with the Everyman and Cork Midsummer Festival, captivated and definitely unsettled.