After Easter is a brilliant play. It’s provocative and so very, very rich.
It’s fundamentally the story of Greta, a young woman beset by visions. Nominally of Catholic background, she’s not religious. She has no idea what to make of her experiences, nor do her family.
Our scientific rationalist society can only interpret such experiences as symptoms of mental illness. And, on many occasions, they probably are.
But they can also be indicative of a powerful imagination and a deep compassion.
Ask plenty of dramatists. They have visitations from their characters. Ibsen famously had conversations with Nora from A Doll’s House. (And it’s not beyond my own ‘spiritual’ experience.)
Director Roz Riley has created an engaging production. She gets good work from her cast. Karoline Rose O’Sullivan is wonderful as Greta, playing her with a poignant bewilderment, filled with wit and warmth. She gets terrific support from Celia Kelly and Eilannin Dhu as her sisters, both delivering moving portraits of beautifully complex women.
Some people might see this play as a family drama, but it was not on this level that I found it so affecting; not unless by ‘family’ we mean the human family.
Set predominately in a Northern Ireland trying to find its way, this remarkable play reminds us of ways of seeing we often neglect. Not traditional religion, but ways of imagination and compassion. Inspired by such radical visions of the world is how we can find the hope to better it.
Veronica Kaye
After Easter by Anne Devlin
Star of the Sea Theatre til 3 May
http://craftwaresolutions.com.au/
Theatre Red 
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