A Note from Dr. Maureen Gaffney on Meredith

Meredith is a twisty play about three generations of a family trying to rub along together: Meredith There is Meredith, an eighty-three year old grandmother, Noelle her middle-aged daughter, and Lorcan her twenty-one year old son and Meredith’s only grandchild.

There is grandeur about Meredith. She’s whimsical. She calls everybody ‘Darling’. She insists on referring to the sunroom, an old extension to the house, as an ‘orangerie’. In the opening scene she is sitting with Abi, the carer whom Noelle has hired to help her. Meredith is conversing animatedly with Abi as she waits for a call from a would-be lover whom she describes as ‘easy on the eye’, adding gleefully ‘Listen to me, a foolish girl. And to think I’ve only known him for a few weeks!’ ‘Ask me anything’ she encourages Abi ‘I am an open book’. But she warns Abi not to tell Noelle whom she considers ‘terribly disapproving’.

In stark contrast, to Meridith’s airy attitude to life, her daughter Noelle is frazzled, simultaneously burdened by worry about her mother’s health and refusal to act her age and her son’s seeming inability to take responsibility for his life. On her way in to visit her mother she touches the bonnet of Meredith’s car. Finding it warm confirms her suspicion that it has been recently driven by her mother, despite being advised by her doctor not to drive until at least six weeks after her recent hip surgery. She wastes no time confronting her mother and Abi: ‘Right. So… which one of you wants to tell me what happened then? Meredith protests ‘My dear, you must learn to make a more civilised entrance’. Noelle is even angrier when she discovers that Meredith has invited Abi to live rent free in the house and accuses her mother of frittering away the family inheritance. She tells her mother that she needs to know what is happening if she is to keep her safe and well.

Meredith is unrepentant. ‘I am my own person and I can make up my mind about how I live my life’ she says and chides Noelle for not visiting her more often than says, adding that if Noelle visited her more often she would know what was happening and that even when she does visit ‘It never feels like you want to be here’. Yet, Meredith picks up that Noelle is troubled by things in her own life and the nature of those troubles is gradually revealed as the play progresses.

Yet for all the arguments and tensions, the three generations care for and about each other. They are generous with their offers of help to each other, even at a cost to themselves. They want to enjoy closer relationships with each other. At the end of her

argument with her mother Noelle says plaintively: ‘This as supposed to be our time together’. Each character is still longing for some acknowledgment of their own individuality and particular set of needs, for some empathy and understanding. These tensions and longings play out in their interactions with each other, in the endless back-and-forth of well-rehearsed and tightly choregraphed arguments. Yet, all the while each is hiding something from themselves and from each other that gradually reveals itself over the course of the play.

As the character of each protagonist unfolds, it becomes clear that for each to move more fully into themselves a kind of a kind of psychological transfusion is required. Noelle needs a bit of Meredith’s daring and carefree attitude to life and Merdith and Lorcan need a bit of Noelle’s sturdy good sense.

In Meredith, the playwright Erica Murray and Director Annabelle Comyn have created an intriguing and compelling production that will leave us pondering again on the psychological intracity and complexity of love and loyalty between people who, however imperfectly, try to care for each other.

Dr. Maureen Gaffney is a psychologist, writer and broadcaster. Her new book About Life will be published on October 28th by Sandycove, Penguin Books.