The Beacon by Nancy Harris review: West Cork murder mystery becomes a beautifully explored family conversation

Irish Times

09-07-2025

The Beacon
Everyman, Cork
★★★★☆
In this
Everyman
revival of a play that's billed as a west Cork family murder mystery but is at heart concerned with contemporary modes of speech, and even of thought, the playwright
Nancy Harris
spikes the narrative with sly and decisive wit.
Hers is delightfully clever writing. In providing not one but several conflicting mysteries, the clues in The Beacon – commissioned by
Druid
in 2019 and here getting its Cork premiere – come almost as asides, with the result that the audience has to remain attentive as well as receptive.
Much of this appeal lies with the play's portrait of an artist working as if in retreat among an island community where the coastal beacon is a metaphor for a family splintering into jagged pieces.
The matriarch of this domestic drama, although she would deride the title, is the famous feminist painter Beiv, master of fashionable modern art and of the put-down, whose cryptic comments quench every attempt at virtue-signalling.
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The Beacon: Ross O'Donnellan and Leonard Buckley as Donal and Colm in Nancy Harris's play. Photograph: Miki Barlok
The laughs come laced with acidity, but Geraldine Hughes invests Beiv with something likable, if not admirable, and establishes a characteristic that drives all the following complex familial revelations.
These emerge with the honeymoon visit of Beiv's son, Colm, and his wife, Bonnie, and with Colm's disapproval of changes to the cottage he remembers from childhood years shared with his father, Michael.
These changes are early signals to more than they seem. While Bonnie's relentless instinct for appeasement ignites Beiv's declaration that an artist needs only isolation and silence, Colm is in search of an explanation for his father's death at sea. What he needs is a cause that would implicate and condemn his mother.
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What Colm is not seeking is anything more than the casual friendship he formed in his youth with Donal, an islander. To Donal that relationship was vital. In a scene of memorable distress he discovers now that it has been misinterpreted. More than this, through the interaction here between Leonard Buckley's obsessive Colm and Ross O'Donnellan's lucid Donal, the play loops back to its interrogation of visual art.
What people see in a painting is not always what is there. What they don't see is what might be there, the pentimento, the painting under the painting.
This is an adroit recapitulation of the plot's underlying intrigue. While Beiv thinks that Colm's aggression is the result of sending him to a private school, and Ayoola Smart's Bonnie defends her amiability by her plan to become a Jungian psychologist, the submerged questioning rises to the inevitable collision of truth, half-truths and suspicion.
Nancy Harris tells Róisín Ingle about her RTÉ drama The Dry
Listen |
47:23
Beiv herself has renounced motherhood as well as society and rebuts Colm's speculations with a barbed honesty. To his accusation that she always loved painting more than she loved him, she replies that painting was more satisfying. We believe her.
While Stephen O'Leary does his irrepressible best as Ray, a podcast journalist, his is a sudden interruption in a delicate sequence nearing finality.
Sara Joyce, as director, might have queried also the embracing set of heaving seas, black as liquid liquorice under clouded skies by Ciarán Bagnall were it not for Bagnall's own expressive lighting design.
There is also the issue of Fiona Sheil's portentous aural effects, all sound and fury, signifying nothing much. In such a well-wrought play these seem unnecessary, but they do not detract from the general impression of a conversation beautifully explored.
The Beacon is at the
Everyman Theatre
, Cork, until Saturday, July 19th