Lyric Theatre

The Lyric Theatre frames a meeting between Cushla Lavery and Michael Agnew around a play about divided selves. Its auditorium places them within the same audience but at a distance, while the interval brings them together in the foyer; the venue’s movement from watching to conversation gives their encounter its shape.

Auditorium and audience

Gerry Devlin apologizes that their seats are far from the stage, but Cushla likes being at the back, where she can watch people enter through the side doors and edge along the rows. The theatre is therefore not only a place to watch the performance: from her seat, Cushla also watches the audience assemble. The view establishes her as an observer before the play begins.

The auditorium’s distances sharpen her attention to Michael. He crosses the rows toward a seat in the third row from the front, pausing with his back to the stage to look slowly across the audience. Cushla thinks his gaze settles on her, then looks to her left, expecting someone nearby to greet him; the woman beside her is absorbed in the programme. The moment leaves his apparent attention suspended between an intimate signal and an uncertain reading.

The performance

Onstage, two actors play the main character’s public and private selves as he prepares to leave for America. Gar Private, the private self, is played by a large actor with a north Antrim accent; Cushla registers the anguish in his lines and delivery. The split casting makes division visible as theatre, while Michael, among the spectators, appears to her quite alone despite the people around him. The performance’s separation of public and private selves thus resonates with the encounter unfolding across the auditorium, without resolving what Michael’s look means.

The foyer and encounter

At the interval, Cushla and Gerry go downstairs to the foyer, where a long table holds drinks with receipts tucked beneath them. Gerry has not ordered in advance and leaves her to go to the bar. Cushla waits at a ledge, clutching both their coats; her dress has begun to cling, and as she lifts its fabric from her chest she becomes aware of someone standing in front of her. It is Michael, holding two whiskies. The shift from distant observation to face-to-face encounter is also a shift in scale: she can now see that his eyes are hazel, flecked with gold, rather than the dark brown she had imagined.

Michael offers her a glass, explaining that a happy misunderstanding has left him with two. Cushla hates whiskey, but accepts it so that he will stay. Their conversation turns to whether she is enjoying the play: she says she had doubted that the two-actor device would work, but loves Gar Private, and calls the performance sad. Michael watches her with evident merriment and nods as though her answer is right. He says he saw the original production at the Abbey in the sixties and asks what else she likes about it. The foyer makes possible a conversation that the auditorium’s distance had only intimated, while the play’s public and private selves offer an oblique frame for their growing attention to one another.