by Mary Leland
Audiences may have become accustomed to the idea of a play within a play, but a house within a house is a relatively new idea and it is not long before the 14 members of the public allowed to walk through Hammergrin’s production of Hollander(at 8 North Mall) realise that nothing in this production is as it seems, least of all the doors. Written by John McCarthy, Ciaran O Conaill and Sara-Jane Power, the piece brings to a kind of life the former proprietor of a mansion decaying even as the play unfolds.
Henry William Hollander, of Cork’s North Mall, has two obsessions: the disappearance of his wife, who may or may not have been accidentally entombed in the cellar; and the coincidence of this event with the great “Battle of the Starlings”, which darkened the skies over Cork city in 1621.
Chronology is not much respected in this script; instead, history is engaged in a series of arbitrary references that make a kind of sense in a scenario in which fireplaces move or hang upside down, chandeliers glow from the floor and visitors to the highly decorated chapel are blindfolded.
Confidently directed by Sara-Jane Power, and with John McCarthy both pathetic and terrifying as the distracted Hollander, the production gleefully reimagines the 18th-century house in which it is located, thanks to designer Ronan Fitzgibbon with obvious apologies to the Irish Georgian Society.