#katieroche

Photo by Ros Kavanagh

Katie Roche: a play with a ring of salt and soil around it, a gangling guffaw and a slice open from your neck to your navel. 

In its copper-worn architectural birdcage, a woman tries so, so hard to be her best self while biting at her own leash. She is tethered in five directions by love: From the well-intentioned but emotionally tone-deaf husband; the boyish lover too flippant with her feelings unable to be brave for her; the docile employer who can never articulate the light she sees; the sounding board and anchor who walks through the fields; and the soil itself of the land she grows in. 

Caoilfhionn Dunne’s Katie Roche is searing in her natural ability to spread a character across her own surface. Physically she is all elbows and knees, a simultaneous rage and joy simmering as she bruises herself in a space that too tightly constrains her. At first displayed as light and childish, we soon see that she only wears herself like her dust-drenched clothes, and that blinding openness is so alien to us that we, like her husband, find it hard at first to appreciate the humanity it represents. She is not childish: she is simply a woman in dire, urgent need of being. 

We try so hard to be good, so hard to be amenable to all, at the expense of ourselves. We try and scrape and kick and smother ourselves, and too late find that we have signed up for a journey with no end and no return. In her quest for greatness, for Being, for Goodness, she pours herself into every opportunity and is met, like many of us, with less enthusiasm than we offer. Every fibre of her body screams LOOK AT ME, and we wonder, briefly, why we condemn that sentiment so much. 

As for the person who has always looked at her, when a connection is finally maid, the sadness of her warmth fills the stage. Siobhan McSweeney’s Amelia is played with the perfect thickness of clotted cream, a smoothing over and a constant easy acceptance peeled back at the last minute. A softly comical character, she cracks through the concrete at the last minute as a wall becomes both a window, and a guillotine descending. 

The earth was in every pore, wet and dry: the rain drenched the room as the tea missed the cup; the hearth crackled when summoned and the wind was on everyone’s tongue. The elements stewed together around an echoing prison, with characters eyeing a person on a pedestal, a decoration amongst the scones. 

We see the men who love Katie, and fear her. Her roving confidante, in a space created for understanding, throws down a war cry demanding her humiliation. Don’t we all know that feeling: the jolt of betrayal when we realise someone we love is nowhere near as brave as we are. And bravery is no badge here: it’s a virtue, and a chain. 

“Be brave, Katie, and it can be grand.”