Do You Come from Gomorrah?Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Dublin★★★★★
Gay self-loathing, sexual abuse and sectarian bigotry are well-trodden theatrical territory. Yet, in this new monologue play on the Peacock stage of the Abbey, Frank McGuinness depicts a world of intimate misery that seems at once familiar and startlingly revelatory.
Told from the perspective of a gay abuse victim, Do You Come from Gomorrah? is about a child-prostitution ring at a Protestant-run “refuge for wayward boys” in Troubles-era Northern Ireland.
The story carries clear echoes of Kincora Boys’ Home, among other historic abuse scandals. But Do You Come from Gomorrah?, which is rich in dark, bawdy humour, also explores how love and passion, however vitiated, might coexist with brutal exploitation. It is a work of searching emotional complexity that deftly navigates the ambiguities of desire and resilience.
Central to that achievement is an immensely poised performance by Ryan Donaldson. As the unnamed Man, he commands the stage with deceptive stillness and negotiates the alternately conversational and biblical rhythms of McGuinness’s text with understated fluency. Donaldson also expertly ventriloquises a memorable series of grotesques who populate his character’s world.
These include “Beastie Billie”, the fanatical pimp in charge of the boys’ home, as well as Steve, an English soldier whom the young inmate longingly dubs “my fucker, my fella”, only for his lover to deliver him into the clutches of a sadistic officer.
“We serve the forces” is one of several mordant one-liners that evoke the moral chaos of a culture defined by hypermilitarised machismo and sectarianism. These Ulster loyalists’ hatred of the Catholic Church emphasises how they share its worst vices.
A counterpoint emerges in the shape of Keith – droll, flirty and, though closeted, not determined to purge his self-loathing through sexual violence. There ensues a surreal excursion to a pub owned by his hook-handed father – who recounts how he lost a hand in a homoerotically charged car crash – followed by a more conventional form of romantic betrayal.
The details of the Man’s grim odyssey are a bit jumbled in places (as befits a narrative of psyche-fracturing trauma). But, under Sarah Baxter’s direction, Do You Come from Gomorrah? remains consistently engaging over the course of 75 minutes. Monologue plays seldom strike such an effective balance between introspection and exposition.
Do You Come from Gomorrah?: Ryan Donaldson in Frank McGuinness’s play. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh
Donaldson’s performance is framed by three dark-grey panels. These at first evoke drab stucco walls that illustrate the Man’s institutional confinement. But, aided by Sinéad McKenna’s chiaroscuro lighting, they come to acquire a stark allegorical grandeur reminiscent of an Anselm Kiefer painting. The pool at the centre of the stage and mirror overhead further contribute to an atmosphere of haunted, enigmatic minimalism in Alyson Cummins’s design.
The play’s title alludes to how institutional abuse was sustained by collective complicity throughout the island of Ireland. For the “refuge” is nicknamed “Gomorrah” by the characters on the outside, who are well aware of what is happening there.
It’s also hard not to think of Marcel Proust. Like the author of Sodom and Gomorrah, McGuinness eschews sentimentality to portray illicit same-sex desire as a theatre of tormented passion, sadism and unrequited love.
Do You Come from Gomorrah? is on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, May 16th