Married to the Sea

Claddagh on the west coast of Ireland used to be a quaint fishing village that supplied the great city of Galway with all the riches of the sea until it was knocked down to make way for a council housing scheme in the 30s. The city has since expanded and engulfed the village, but its ghosts live on in Shona McCarthy’s hauntingly lyrical Married to the Sea, a low key love song to the old, forgotten folk.

Eight year old Jo’s imagination is as infinite as the sea, and often as stormy. Adults behave in capricious and surprising ways, and while her father is off at sea on long-haul fishing trips, she fills the vacuum of her neglected existence with wild speculations about nature’s whims, cavorting with the winds and talking to the sky. However, her life’s soft mysteries turn stale when a certain she-devil arrives on horseback with a travelling circus, disrupting the magical order of Jo's small universe once and for all, ahead of her village’s redevelopment and the pacific death of her community.

The twenty-something year-old Siobahn Donnellan gives a charming performance in the role of Jo, beaming her mystical suspicions about the universe with a shrill, ever-excited voice, with an equally impressive Fiachra O Dubhghaill dexterously shape-shifting between the motley male roles. But in spite of the production’s remarkable polish, underlying it is a lacklustre plot with insufferably slow tempo, and all the marvellous metaphors come only at the price of your enduring commitment.