LIES WE TELL

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

An orphaned Irish teenager spars with her scheming uncle in this insightful reworking of Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel.
At a girthy mansion called Knowl, at one point described as “a barracks of a place” somewhere in the Irish countryside, teenager Maud Ruthyn (O’Casey) has just inherited everything after the death of her father. However, she’s still a minor and, more unfortunately for her, a woman, and therefore not fit to make decisions for herself; Maud therefore becomes the ward of her uncle Silas (Wilmot) until she comes of age. Keen to honour her father’s wishes and the terms of her inheritance, Maud welcomes Silas to her home even though she barely knows him and that he was once accused of murdering a man to whom he owed money – but got off thanks to lack of evidence. Exuding the slithery bonhomie of a cobra meeting a mongoose for the first time, Silas makes himself at home, bringing along his feckless son Edward (Chris Walley) and flibbertigibbet daughter Emily (Holly Sturton), along with Emily’s governess Madame (Grainne Keenan). Before long, Silas’s sinister intentions become clear, which include bullying Maud into marrying her cousin Edward and bribing the servants to turn against her. When brutalising her by proxy doesn’t work, the conspirators threaten to have her committed to an asylum for hysterical women, equipped with what sounds like a 19th-century waterboarding kit.
Maud has a mongoose’s survival instinct, and the haughty blue-eyed gaze of an aristocratic matron who won’t be screwed around so easily. The script by Elisabeth Gooch appropriates the fruity diction of the times just enough to add credibility without getting bogged down in circumlocution, and O’Casey’s delivery is sharp as a steak knife. It’s a delight to watch her verbally spar with Wilmot’s Silas, coyly jabbing at each other according to the rules of civility but growing more acrimonious as the stakes get higher. Director Lisa Mulcahy (Wasteland, The Legend of Longwood) clears the paths and lets them rip with confident, clear-sighted direction.