Review: A Deep Dive into Quarter-Life Despair in Enda Walsh's Safe House

If you’ve been following the three-decade career of Irish playwright Enda Walsh, you might approach Safe House–his 10th production at St. Ann’s Warehouse–with some warranted trepidation. His plays tend to veer off the wall, and not always as effectively as 2012’s Misterman, which had the considerable advantage of Cillian Murphy honing the edge of madness.

In his latest play–more of a song cycle, really–Kate Gilmore plays Grace, an unhoused, semi-unhinged young woman surviving on her own in a drab town in Ireland. Grace’s dysfunction is rendered even more poignant by her inability to relinquish memories of a more stable past.

From what little storyline emerges, Grace’s downfall seems like a fairly standard case of post-girlhood disenchantment, maybe a bit amped up. An innocent child loses her seemingly secure perch in the world, and in this case, her sanity. We’re shown home-movie snippets of 12-year-old Grace wearing a tiara and princess costume (the live, onstage Grace sometimes sports a tattered adult version). Her mother appears cold and scolding. The only grown-up whom Grace loves, an Irish-speaking auntie, dies, leaving her adrift.

At one point, a film clip of a young man hovers over her: deflowerer, lover, pimp, all three? He evidently abandons the adoring Grace, for reasons left unclear. Taunting male voices sometimes filter down from the wings. “She’d fuck us for money–it’s no big deal, ya know.”

Is Grace living in an underground chamber or at street level, roofless? (The script specifies exactly where, along with the era; the staging does not.) Clambering atop her armoire, a relic/replacement from her childhood, Grace reaches a more peaceful, seaside-like realm, an idyll soon shattered by a slo-mo film clip of a huge, snarling Rottweiler on the attack.

Grace’s plight is surely touching, and movement-wise, Gilmore is a marvel. A dancer/acrobat by trade, she makes maximal use of a wide, detritus-packed space furnished—strewn, really—by  scenic and costume designer Katie Davenport. However, given the near-relentless drone of composer Anna Mullarkey’s synthpop score set to Walsh’s lyrics– minimal variations on snippets of inner monologue, a kind of emo sprechstimme–audience empathy is apt to drain fast.

Walsh has been venturing into pre-recorded installations of late, and this piece could be approached as a live extrapolation, a post-apocalyptic vision in 3D with surround sound.

Jack Phelan’s video design, projected on the stage’s rear wall, spurs and supplements the action below. Apart from the surprise entrance of a toilet mounted on a rolling pedestal (the detached loo serves Grace as a mobile throne of sorts), Davenport’s disaster area of a set doesn’t hold much intrigue. Adam Silverman’s lighting, however, is appropriately mercurial, like Grace’s moods.

Walsh, doing double duty as writer/director, does not lay out an easy path for linear thinkers. In fact, it’s safe to say that the assorted allusions and motifs he tosses in are meant to render the viewer as disassociated as the individual under his lens.

Is Grace the sacrificial victim of a “refrigerator mother,” her psychic scarring further amplified by a degrading patriarchal culture? Perhaps. But however much one may empathize with her, it remains a challenge to get to the heart of Grace’s psyche–or Walsh’s impulse to probe it.