Two sisters circle each other in the antechamber of an evangelical church, one of them trying to figure out why the other has just assaulted an elderly woman whom the first was baptising in the Irish sea. From the off, it’s clear that there is history here with both a big and a little H. There is also a woolly lamb which, this being allegory, is bound to take some punishment before the day is done.
The play’s title is the Hebrew word for the binding of Isaac by Abraham in the Old Testament as he prepares to sacrifice his son. Its significance isn’t obvious in this story of two daughters of the Northern Irish Troubles, except that both are in their different ways in thrall to The Man. Gill, the older sister, is loyal to the memory of their brutal paramilitary father, while Kelly is handmaiden to a charismatic preacher, whose controlling presence pings on to her phone every other minute.
Michael John O’Neill’s monologue This Is Paradise was well received two years ago on the Edinburgh fringe. It was performed by the tremendous Amy Molloy, who reappears in this O’Neill play as the nerve-shot Gill, a woman so damaged by her past that she has dedicated herself to the monastic life of an out-of-hours office cleaner. Where Molloy is a dark symphony of flinches and flails, Ruby Campbell’s Kelly sounds a high, bright note of brain-washed ardency, as they disinter a trauma that they never fully shared.
Though the intensity of the performances doesn’t falter in Lucy Morrison’s taut staging, there is no space for the characters to develop. They have a visitation of sorts but, in the play as in their lives, it is too little, too late to offer any resolution. This 90-minute piece, billed as O’Neill’s first full-length work, has already done its work for him, drawing attention to a promising voice for Northern Ireland with a valuable interest in writing for women. It might have been wiser to leave it in the thicket of new writer awards than to lead it out to the altar.
At Hampstead theatre, London, until 18 March
