Maeve is traumatised by events in her past that have recently caught up with her, and Dawn, her new care worker, is there to make things easier. Maeve and Dawn perform little improvisations from The Importance of Being Earnest to try and help Maeve work through the troubling memories that are eating away at her.
The Importance of Being, performed by Green Curtain Theatre at The Lion and Unicorn, references the title and storyline of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, mainly the unseen relationship between the baby Jack and his mysterious mother. Maeve repeatedly asks where the empathy for the mother is, her biggest worry being that the child will forget that it has a birth mother at all. It follows the relationship of Maeve, an older woman obsessed with Wilde's play, and Dawn, her assigned care worker from the Celtic Centre.
The subtitle of Wilde's comedy is 'A Trivial Comedy for Serious People', but this production highlights the all but trivial relationship between mother and child, and more specifically the unforgettable ordeal that many Irish women were made to go through in having their children taken away from them as a result of bearing children out of wedlock. Colette Kelly's performance as Maeve does well to demonstrate the mental struggle that the separation of mother and child can cause, even years after the fact. The production flits between moments of comedy between the young care worker and the woman in her care, and this woman's disjointed delusional memories of motherhood mixed with scenes from Wilde's play. However, Kelly's distinction between delusional grieving mother and sarcastic older woman with a sharp Irish wit could have been more pronounced. At times the moments of delusion blended too seamlessly with 'normality' and became slightly confused.
Dawn as a character comes as a relief to the audience who had been tricked into thinking briefly that the entire show would consist of melodramatically performed Oscar Wilde, as Maeve opens the The Importance of Being with a monologue from The Importance of Being Earnest. Thankfully things change with the entrance of the kind and gentle Dawn, played sensitively by Orla Sanders. There were some truly touching moments shared between the two actors that related Maeve's experience of losing a child with Dawn's experience of having been adopted very young. The interweaving of these two narrative's is done subtly and each characters' story adds insight into the experiences of both mother and child in such a circumstance.
A slight confusion in the storyline was the vague reasoning behind Maeve's decent to delusion, which sadly is never fully explained by the events on stage. Allusions to an explanation are made through a letter and brief conversation between Maeve and Dawn, but the details are never fully enclosed and we are left guessing as to what exactly made Maeve's health slip so dramatically.
At some points unclear in narrative and direction, The Importance of Being is a touching story of grief and caring.
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