As suggested in the title of Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me by Frank McGuinness the ambiguous action of watching is one of the central ideas in this hypnotically compassionate play, inspired by the kidnapping and incarceration of Brian Keenan in the Lebanon in the 1980s. The curtainless silence of two of the three watchful prisoners positions them as witnesses to the banal actions of theatre-goers, as we politely take our seats. Some of us are aware that the watching performance has already commenced, some of us are not. Thanks to Pierce Kavanagh’s subtle lighting design, which beams interrogatively outward during this unseen ‘scene’, the captivated view us the liberated more clearly than we do them.

Rather than examining on stage the political events which may or may not have surrounded the horrific abduction of Brian Keenan and his fellow hostages, McGuinness opts instead for the somehow more real exposition of the human experiance. It is our innate survival mechanisms against local and universal horror which the play attempts to unlock by allowing us to see the intricate yet fragile veins which make up the fine line between sanity and the apparent disorder of insanity. These two prisoners, soon to be three, are chained to a radiator in a hostile and unknown place, wrenched from their tenderly remembered world in which the routine of daylight, clocks and freedom is dismissively unrestricted. The simplistic beauty of this play lies in its subtle and humorous ability to reveal the chains we insist on instinctively binding around our controlled and ordered selves.

The arrival of Michael, the English Professor beautifully played by Duncan Hamilton, enriches the enticing dark humour which permeates this Blackwater production of McGuinness’s early 1990s play. As part of Michael’s bizarre induction into hostage life Edward, an Irish journalist (Charlie Bonner), and Adam, an American doctor (Malachy McKenna), raucously demand of him to “laugh, damn you, laugh” so that he might sustain himself by refusing to let their unseen captors hear him crying in despair. Michael is however appalled and refuses at this point to trivialise the raw fear elicited by his enforced containment.

Humour and mild absurdity is crucial to the psychic equilibrium of Edward, Adam and Michael. The play’s montage of comedic role play through limitless imagination enables their unchained flights of fancy and fantasy. They direct and star in their own movies and also fly over England’s landscape in an airbound car gleefully singing ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’. For suspended moments of uncomplicated bliss the three men are without their heavy fetters. The heightened euphoria of such free moments of comedy is however equalled by the devastating tragedy of their predicament as wild fantasy is replaced by crushing reality.

It is this elusive dichotomy of liberating fantasy and entrapped reality that the play decodes and unravels. As the three hostages try to control their suffering by urging each other to laugh rather than sink into self-absorbed oblivion, the tenuous fragility of this effort at times splits in heart-breaking honesty as mutual resentment and uncertainty break through to the surface. Ultimately though, the aching human need for protection - giving and receiving - transcends frustrated resentment and fear throughout the action.

McGuinness captures a boyish vulnerability in terms of the characters’ deconstructed masculinity. Adam laments the rationalised strength of what a true heroic American is perceived to be. Michael tries to comprehend his father’s stoical English pride in containing emotion at all costs and recalls a single tender but restrained connection between father and son. The writing questions the real value of such notions of male patriotism and rigidity by exposing their facile uselessness when plunged into unforeseen chaos and incivility. This timeless play inherently suggests that beneath the veneer of rationalised and practiced power lie sinister human forces capable of rendering us utterly powerless.

Rossa O’Siordáin’s direction elicits the sensory delights of McGuinness’s language and action in which taste and touch are evocatively imagined through verbalised fantasies of longed for pleasures, now cruelly denied in the prisoners’ stark cell existence. Returning to the idea of watching, true vision is reflected in the imaginary cocktail glasses the men insist on holding up for longer than is probably necessary for the enactment of their drinking fantasy.

At the interval Chisato Yoshimi’s starkly lit single light bulb set, like the beginning, remains without the obstruction of the stage curtain and this absence of a veil or barrier alludes to the inevitable transparency, like the cocktail glasses, of the human soul, whether it is viewed through raw tragedy or the darkest of humour. Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me strips us of our opaque barriers and contrived psychic shackles and simply asks us to see that the only unshaded or bare reality is that truth and love remain on constant and watchful view.

The play’s final scene recalls Michael’s earlier story his father shared with him as a boy. This ancient tale tells of the Spartans who were unafraid to nurture and protect each other displaying this by combing the hair of their fellow soldiers and comrades. This tender ritual is beautifully re-enacted by Edward and Michael as Edward prepares for his sudden yet tormented release. Silently Michael, whose character is in many ways the most developed, wills himself and his liberated friend to be courageous. Edward is now at liberty to desire more than base survival; he is truly free to choose life and love.
 
Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me by Frank McGuinness
Blackwater Projects at the Tivoli Theatre, Dublin November 19th – December 5th 2009
Tickets €20/€15 www.tivoli.ie