Conservatory

Description

'I wasn't throwing up. I was dying. I was very ill . . . And do you know what? In the middle of all that . . . malaise, I remember thinking "This is what it's like to be married." But I'd do it again' An elderly couple sit in a dark room in their house, doing the crossword, taking their tablets and knitting, all the while raking over a traumatic past that has all but destroyed them. Conservatory is a compelling play about loss and family which shows that happiness is not a necessary condition of togetherness. It premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in March 2014.

Michael West is an award-winning playwright whose plays include Dublin by Lamplight, Foley and A Play on Two Chairs, all produced with the Corn Exchange theatre company. He has written numerous translations including Death and the Ploughman (Gate Theatre, London), The Seagull, The Marriage of Figaro (Abbey Theatre) and Tartuffe (Gate Theatre, Dublin).

In West's portrait of a soured relationship . . . telling details build only incrementally; by the end, however, the audience has formed a troubling vision of a marriage marred by human weakness and gut-wrenc[h]ing tragedy. -- Daragh Reddin * Metro Herald * Conservatory is a marvellous play, absorbing, intense and elegant... as a meditation on the disintegration of marriage into a hell of weary familiarity... it paints an exquisitely aware canvas of human frailty and unfulfilled need. -- Emer O'Kelly * Irish Independent * West's writing is remarkable for its restraint. There is no showboating, just a consistent employment of language as neat and cutting as a surgical implement. -- Alan O'Riordan * Irish Examiner *