Suzy Storck – Smock Alley – Review
by Frank L.

10 – 13 April – 8pm – Boys’ School

It is 8.45 pm on “another unbearably hot evening”. Suzy Storck (Alexandra Conlon) is alone apart from her three children who are locked in their bedroom. Evidence of their existence is shown by odd toys littering the floor. Suzy Storck no longer works. She gave up her job in “poultry” when she married her husband Hans-Vasily Kreuz (Kristian Phillips). She is waiting for him to return – “Maybe he’s coming home. Maybe he’s not.”  She is trapped in a world that she never wanted.

There are three empty bottles of wine on the table in front of her. Her mother Mrs. Storck (Gene Rooney) exacerbates her sense of loneliness and entrapment. Hans -Vasily does eventually return. They are not a happy couple. The sense of observing Suzy Storck from a distance is intensified by one actor, Jeanne Nicole ni Ainle, who takes no part in the action but provides a certain amount of background and insight. It is a role like that of a Greek Chorus or a narrator.

The writer of this work, Magali Mougel,  was born in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, in the northeast of France in 1982. The play Suzy Storck was a finalist in the Grand Prix de Litterature Dramatique in 2014. This is its Irish premiere. The seating of the Boys’ School, in Smock Alley is altered for this production with it now forming two rows on two sides of the space. The stage takes the form of a raised square platform. It is festooned with washing hanging out to dry on an assortment of clotheslines.

There is an underlying formality to the proceedings as the characters are referred to by their full names – Suzy Storck, Hans-Vasily Kreuz and Mrs Storck. It intensifies the sense of entrapment which Suzy Storck endures. All the time the three children, unseen, cast a pall over the proceedings. They are never far away.

Conlon has the challenge of playing what is an enormous part. She is probably somewhat young for the role. That said she at all times conveyed the sense of drudgery and monotony that has ensnared Suzy Storck’s existence. Phillips has a simpler character to realise in that Hans-Vasily is bewildered by his wife’s torpor and sense of dissatisfaction with her life. It is not a happy relationship. While Suzy Storck is married with three children she makes clear that she has had little or no choice in how that state of affairs has come about.

The play has a stylised quality to it given the full use of the characters’ names and the deployment of the narrator-like figure. It places the three characters in some far-off existence when in reality the world that Suzy Storck inhabits is not that exceptional.

The reconfiguration of the theatre by set designer Freya Gillespie worked. Cathal Cleary Theatre who produced the play are to be thanked for delivering a serious production of a contemporary, foreign language play. Dublin needs to see more of such offerings.

WRITTEN BY Magali Mougel
TRANSLATED BY Chris Campbell
DIRECTED BY Ursula McGinn
LIGHTING DESIGN BY Pedro Pacheco
SET DESIGN BY Freya Gillespie
COSTUME DESIGN BY Freya Gillespie
SOUND DESIGN BY HK Ní Shioradáin
CAST: Alexandra Conlon, Jeanne Nicole Ní Áinle, Kristian Phillips, Gene Rooney