THEATRE: The importance of being earnest

Three monologues about suicide. Not the kind of thing to get you to the theatre on a cold night. But this play is travelling to schools, where it should find an engaged and passionate audience for its sensitive storytelling, writes Colin Murphy

II spent the night of the crucial Ireland-Switzerland match in October watching a play about baby rape. On a recent Saturday I nearly missed a party with old friends to spend an hour with a community youth theatre group in a derelict flat at the top of a block in Ballymun. And this week, on one of the coldest, bleakest evenings of the year so far, I traipsed out to the Helix for a group of monologues on suicide. Worse, they're intended for a school audience, and it was to be followed by a Q&A with someone from the Samaritans.

Why am I doing this? This is a theatre column – I should be celebrating theatre, not wallowing in it.

Worthiness and earnestness is always a problem for theatre. One, people don't like paying for it on a Saturday night. Two, it gets in the way of drama. Unless you're Agusto Boal, forging improvised, participative theatre in Brazil from the conflicts and tensions that your audience brings to you ("theatre of the oppressed", he calls it), worthy issues and dramatic conflict are difficult to reconcile on the stage.

Which poses another problem: theatre can end up fighting shy of "issues", or waiting for a master playwright (a David Hare or Tony Kushner) to address them before they grace the main stage.

But some people are just too impatient. Companies like Smashing Times, Team and Calypso consistently produce work that is self-consciously political, work that seeks to provoke and engage debate about the way we organise society and our lives. They take a risk: the risk of being worthy, earnest and didactic; the risk of failing to resolve their chosen issues into a coherent and compelling drama; the risk of wearing their woolly liberal hearts on their sleeves, of being, fatally, uncool.

In Testimonies, Smashing Times have courted those risks, and survived. The three monologues that make up Testimonies each deal with suicide. What is amazing is that they manage to do so without being maudlin, angst-ridden or sentimental.

This show's market, and its forum, is the school hall. In the black box studio space at the Helix it seems encumbered by the small, polite audience and deferential darkness. But its three actors, who each perform a short and simple monologue, have the gift of immediacy and authenticity, and pull the audience in.

In the first piece, written by Paul Kennedy, Sean O'Boyle plays the friend of a young man who has killed himself, reflecting on the events leading up to the suicide. O'Boyle plays with an innate naturalness, and Kennedy's script is deft and credible. Though there is little "dramatic" in the action, the piece is quietly compelling.

Bibbi Larsson faces a greater challenge playing the second monologue, by Mary Moynihan. Whereas O'Boyle appears to be simply talking to an acknowledged audience, Larsson is stuck between relating past events and reliving them, with the result that the piece is occasionally jarring as the character jumps from narration into full-blown emotional reaction to the events being retold. (Despite a structural awkwardness, there is a raw power in Larsson's performance.) This is also the more complex of the stories, dealing with a young professional woman who slowly develops a mild mental illness in the form of panic attacks and depression, and seeks treatment.

Margaret Toomey gives the outstanding performance of the night, in Paul Kennedy's story of a woman at therapy after her son's suicide.

Like his first piece, there is little conceit about the setting of the monologue – in this, Toomey is seen to be simply talking to her therapist, in real time. It is a crafted, nuanced, searing performance of, again, a credible and compelling piece.

The monologues are sprinkled with signpost phrases that could come from a government-sponsored awareness campaign: "They tell us one person in four will suffer from some kind of mental illness"; "when I got ill, I couldn't listen to reason, but the doctors did understand"; "by the time he was 19, he was really into the drink".

Largely, though, they steer clear of patronising or simplistic renderings of "youth" and of mental illness. The monologues' greatest strength is in fact what they leave out – trite explanations for the "why" of the suicides. These are the people left behind, not gifted with some knowledge or insight from beyond the grave as to what slowly and then finally drove their loved ones to kill themselves. Their struggling to understand, and labouring with guilt, is the most moving aspect of the piece

As well as the show, there are two workshops developed to go with it – one for adults, based on suicide prevention, and one for young people based on coping strategies for dealing with potentially stressful situations – from binge drinking to exam stress to issues of sexual identity. The show may now tour further to schools, or may find a venue and bring the schools to it (and there's no reason, other than practicality, to restrict it to schools – it would work in any community setting).

?More: www.smashingtimes.ie or contact Freda Manweiler at 01-865613 for details