There’s a new man in Máire’s life. But some people aren’t happy.
On the morning of her 67th birthday, Máire sits up in bed enjoying a cigarette. She has recently been swept off her feet by a stranger and hasn’t felt this alive in years, but a visit from her son with dark revelations challenges the euphoria.
Deirdre Kinahan’s fiercely funny and utterly gripping new play charts an extraordinary shift in Ireland’s social, political, and religious life. It asks questions about responsibility, how we respond to trauma, and the tricky question of forgiveness.
It stars legendary Irish actress Marie Mullen (The Music Man, Broadway; The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Druid, for which she won a Tony Award) in a tour-de-force performance. She is joined by Jamie O’Neill in this riveting two-hander directed by one of Ireland’s leading theatre directors, Louise Lowe.
The Saviour was first broadcast online in 2021 and makes its world stage premiere at the Irish Rep this summer.
I’ll admit I found the tonal shifts that accompany this development a bit jarring. When Mullen’s Máire is alone with her invisible Son of God, her confessions and revelations tickle and sting; once her own son, played by an adroit and appealing Jamie O’Neill, enters the picture, their increasingly heated conversation is less tempered by levity, or wit. And those twists, while dramatically engaging, seem a bit contrived—the first in its sheer awfulness, the other in its conspicuous topicality. Aoife Kavanagh’s sound design, likewise, can be aggressively ominous, particularly as the play reaches its chilling conclusion.
How Máire reacts in the remaining 70 minutes, how her religious convictions in regard to her beloved Jesus prevail – or don’t– won’t be revealed here. But Mullen’s superior performance as an aging woman holding tenaciously to the possibility of new romance is further enhanced, just as religion is kept from gaining any kind of upper hand.
2023 | Off-Broadway |
Irish Repertory Theater Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2024 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Lead Performer in an Off-Broadway Play | Marie Mullen |
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