Written and directed by Mark O’Rowe, Reunion explores the tense and fragile dynamic of a family (and their extended families) in a holiday cottage on an island off the west coast of Ireland. Elaine (Aislín McGuckin) invites her three adult children, Marilyn (Kate Gilmore), Maurice (Peter Corboy), and Janice (Venetia Bowe), along with their partners, for the remembrance of their father Sean. At first, the reunion appears cheerful and relaxed, full of easy conversation—like walking on thin ice. However, the sudden arrival of Aonghus (Ian-Lloyd Anderson), a local now living in Germany, shatters the calm and ignites the undercurrents of unresolved familial tensions that lie just beneath.
O’Rowe’s writing feels somewhat Chekhovian, especially Platonov, where a large group of family gathers in a countryside house to gradually unfold the lost past and emotional weight. O’Rowe is attentive to nuance, finely drawn perspectives that reveal different ways of thinking between sexes while at the same time exposing how both men and women can simultaneously be predators and victims—gendered way of thinking cannot excuse the baseness of human nature.
However, unlike Platonov, where Russia’s political reforms, class divisions and restructurings, and the commerce of land and property are interwoven with familial tensions, the substance of Reunion feels harder to grasp. It is as though the play has been stripped of the socio-cultural framework that shapes such domestic dramas, given its deliberate Irish setting. The characters feel contrived and thus the provocations feel forced.
For instance, the subplot between Elaine and her daughter Marilyn runs faintly through the play but is never fully brought into focus. Unlike the other family and couple conflicts, which remain convincing even when detached from a broader context, the Elaine–Marilyn relationship takes off but lands nowhere.
The real highlight of the play, I reckon, lies in the humour of O’Rowe’s writing, paired with those silent moments that both fill and respond to inexpressible emotions, especially in Stephen Brennan’s portrayal of a wry, deadpan Felix. He is the father of Holly (Simone Collins), Maurice’s wife. He is forever fetching himself another beer, and rarely speaks. Brennan masterfully balances silence and tension so that almost every word he does utter provokes great laughter from the auditorium, while at the same time grounding the play’s scarce reserves of audience empathy in his character.
The rest of the cast prove equally magnificent. McGuckin and Catherine Walker, as sisters Elaine and Gina, offer contrasting portraits. While McGuckin’s Elaine is an overly worrying mother, Walker’s Gina embodies a confident elegance of her age. Among the younger generation of women (Gilmore, Bowe, and Collins), each establishes a distinct persona through subtle differences in their manners.
The three young men, Leonard Buckley (Ciaran, Marilyn’s partner), Stephen Hagan (Stuart, Janice’s partner), and Corboy, collectively illustrate varied personalities: Ciaran as timid, Stuart as masculine, and Maurice as responsibility-driven—a bit like his mother. In the meantime, they also share this kind of brotherhood, heading off to the pub together despite not being blood-bound. Anderson, as Aonghus, captures with precision both the childishness and violence of a man unable to move on from his past with Marilyn.
Francis O’Connor’s naturalistic design of the cottage interior centres on the kitchen table, at times becoming painfully empty, left bare with no one onstage. Accompanied by Aoife Kavanagh’s nostalgic, melancholic interludes during scene transitions, this cottage becomes a symbol of an irretrievable, carefree family life—one that is eternally lost.
