There are no certainties in Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s unsettling, deliberately funny, well-performed play that riffs on the complicated trauma of sexual abuse in which apparent victims become abusers and vice versa.
The opening dream sequence gives us a man wearing a duck mask emerging from a wardrobe and dancing with Faye (Charlotte McCurry). In the following scene, Faye tells her doctor she hasn’t slept for two weeks partly because of nightmares about a man in a duck mask, though she thinks she has recovered from a duck-masked intruder into her home of a year before.
He suggests she is “bipolar”, and subsequent scenes do suggest she has mental health issues. However, determined to cure her sleep problem by her version of “exposure therapy”, she asks her brother Naoise (Thomas Finnegan), whom she hasn’t seen for a year, to climb out of her wardrobe wearing a duck mask.
Not only is he initially unwilling to do that with anyone, he finds it particularly awkward given he is currently suspended from work pending an investigation into an allegation by a canteen worker of “sexual assault” after he kissed her.
Feeling guilty about not seeing Faye for a year following her publicly stripping off at a party, he reluctantly agrees and is physically hit by Faye, proving she can defend herself, and is later sexually abused.
The fragmentary, disturbing storyline, which increasingly casts doubt on the claims of the women characters, is lightened by the physical and verbal comedy, several short joyful “swing” dances and a positive conclusion of sorts.
Its stylistic, dreamlike, comedic horror feels like the cousin to “in yer face” theatre as it worries about the claims made by women about sexual abuse.
Such questions are of course important, but at a time when, for instance, in 2023, charges of rape in England and Wales had been brought against just 2.5% of those rapes recorded by police, the victims of abuse are still a long way from getting justice or the support they need.