Review: REUNION, Kiln Theatre

Lock a few theatre characters in a room together, sit them around a dinner table and they surely won’t leave without revealing a few hidden resentments, infidelities, or family secrets they thought they’d take to their graves. It’s a tried and tested dramatic formula, and one that’s hard to get right.

Reunion takes most of its beats from that familiar playbook, taking us to a remote Irish island for a family gathering, which consists of Elaine, her three adult children and their partners – married eldest daughter Janice, her sister and bitter rival Marilyn, and ‘golden boy’ Maurice and his pregnant girlfriend Holly – along with Holly’s father, Felix, and Elaine’s recently divorced sister Gina. Ostensibly, they’ve come together to celebrate and mourn the life of Elaine’s late husband Sean, though oddly this recent bereavement isn’t actually addressed much in the text, either implicitly or explicitly.

If you’re struggling to keep track of all the names and relationships so far, you wouldn’t be alone. Playwright and director Mark O’Rowe, who also co-wrote the Normal People TV adaptation, writes fantastic observational comedy, but with up to ten characters on stage at times, it’s hard to let these interactions breathe. In a bid to give every character onstage a backstory and motivation, O’Rowe weaves them all intricate inner lives – one is experiencing domestic abuse, another is sexually frustrated, someone else has a mother with a terminal illness, and so on – but drops these threads as quickly as he picks them up.

The inciting incident for most of the domestic turmoil spilling out onto the stage is the arrival of Aonghus, Marilyn’s ex, bedraggled and so hung up on Marilyn that he’s invented a fictional wife and daughter to tell nosy villagers about. Aonghus (Ian-Lloyd Anderson) is a kind of cross between Heathcliff and the worst kind of Instagram poet, threatening to kill himself if Marilyn doesn’t reunite with him, and Anderson oozes darkness and satire in equal measure.

However, the rich web of themes this development promises to explore – isolation, and manipulation, and the lies we tell to those around us – don’t quite find themselves reflected in the wider narrative. After we’ve been confronted with a man on the verge, a one-man takedown of the so-called male loneliness epidemic, it’s hard to then return to lower-stakes domestic dramas, such as  an awkward flirtation between two other lonely house-guests.

O’Rowe is a better writer on the micro rather than the macro level – his writing feels overwhelmed by the occasion when trying to conjure a chaotic family dinner, but revels in the smaller interactions between people. His cast ably carry the subtleties of these scenes, with understated chemistry and a strong dose of bathetic Irish humour; Stephen Brennan is a particular highlight as divorced father Felix, placid and monosyllabic, imbuing every line with laugh-out-loud matter-of-factness and more than a tinge of pathos and repression.

Unlike so many other plays and films set in Ireland, aside from a few seagull sound effects and mentions of cliffs, there’s not much sense here of an wild outdoors beyond the pleasant mid-century modern home we find ourselves in (Francis O’Connor’s set, in fact, feels a little too minimalistic and contemporary for our isolated rural setting) – that might have provided a much-needed sense of the drama actually meaning something outside Elaine’s four walls. The endless familial conflict may be well observed, but without any coherent thematic message to be drawn from this slice of life, Reunion doesn’t ever quite elevate itself beyond a particularly wry soap opera.

Reunion plays at the Kiln Theatre until 11 October