View from the Green Room: All homes are boxes
The People that Live in Boxes at Garter Lane.
People that live on the street have histories they’re unwilling to share. Tragic, uncontrollable destinies led them to a tent or a glorified box on a street. Suspicious of everyone. Trusting no one. Sometimes not even themselves.
The detritus of low life lies everywhere in makeshift shelters. Boxes, strips of plastic, carpet squares. Cardboard to shield the body from the concrete base of their lives.
Pallets bring six-inch suspension from frozen earth. A barely functioning flickering primus brings mugs of tea to warm the hands. Boring lives of monotone grind lacking in gaiety or interest and utterly bereft of colour.
Joe’s (Patrick Hennegan) got history. So has Becca (Helena Walsh-Kiely). But…it’s their histories. Not ours. And they’re not really willing to share. Joe is apparently resigned to his lot as better than the abusive home he was born into. Becca is angry, impulsive, edgy, suspicious. A recovering addict that trusts no one… "who took my f**king gloves…where’s me fags…gimme money for fags…I feel the f**king cold and I f**king hate it…hate it!"
Joe is kind. He looks out for her, recognising Becca as hurt and vulnerable. He gives her money when he has it and, despite her argumentative, confrontational personality, sticks with her. "Come beggin’ with me," says Joe as he clings to a routine that makes some sense of ordered life on the street. Becca wants none of it.
What brought them to this? The question is the dramatic hook that keeps us focused.
When mature student Jenny (Carmel Furlong) comes a-calling with questions to fuel her thesis on homelessness, matters take their own course. Unfortunately, Jenny’s passive supplicant character insists on answers to questions that rattle paranoid Becca’s cage, and who mistrusts the quasi-academic’s reasons for asking them. Jenny’s part is poorly written. Despite the actress’s best efforts, Jenny comes across as a self-seeking busybody who fails to recognise the boundaries and the dignity of souls in turmoil. Becca lectures her that "all homes are boxes". These are poor who are really poor.
The hyphenated poor: poor-and-young, poor-and-on-their-own, poor-and-hungry, poor-and-desperate, poor-and-despairing.
As truths tumble out like Monday’s washing, life on Joe’s street takes a turn for the worse with the arrival of Martin (Emmett Cullinane), a drunken, extreme right-wing yob with a knife. And looking for a fight. Unfortunately, there’s no reset button to what happens next.
Garter Lane Basement is an inhospitable and gloomy venue that probably suits tonight’s subject matter. Other than that, it has nothing to recommend it. Sight lines are non-existent. I was in the second row and missed most of the action. Lighting is perfunctory and stage action is limited to the tiny acting space.
The delight is in the performances of Joe and Becca and in the contrast between two desperates who share a common humanity. Helena Walsh-Kiely is superb as the edgy, confrontational, street-wary addict whose motivation is the next fag, while Patrick Hennigan is excellent as the tolerant, street-wise friend who orbits his friend’s tantrums with day-to-day survival his only goal. Their separate and past histories is the oxygen of a drama that is an unsparing watch.
Helena Walsh-Kiely directs and does well to bring the two central characters to sympathetic light in the tense 50-minute production.
