A year has passed since her home invasion, but Faye isn’t sure she’s over it. Suffering from insomnia and living in fear of a masked man who haunts her nightmares, Faye takes matters into her own hands.
A perfect balance of light and dark, Lie Low had me laughing away goosebumps
Enlisting the help of her estranged brother Naoise, Faye tries a form of immersion therapy that requires Naoise to hide in her wardrobe and Faye to take off her pants. So far, so… strange.
A perfect balance of light and dark, Lie Low had me laughing away goosebumps in the first minute. From a fast-paced dance number with Duck Man, straight into a booming psychiatric evaluation, it’s clear from the get-go that Lie Low will be perfectly unhinged, just like its main character Faye, played by Charlotte McCurry.
With her unique breed of Irish lyricism and dark humour, playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth commands the Royal Court’s upper stage for a full seventy minutes. Her depiction of victimhood and perpetration is as nuanced as it is funny, and her playful handling of complicity and delusion is acted out perfectly by a bold, wild-eyed McCurry.
As the siblings volley blame, Thomas Finnegan’s delicate comic timing as Naoise gives us laugh-out-loud moments, while poignancy comes in the subtext of their disagreements.
The play asks: who do you support in a he-said/she-said injustice? Whether you agree with Faye’s black-and-white view of sexual assault or Naoise’s somewhat greyer view, Lie Low forces us to peer closer at Faye’s righteous toxicity as much as Naoise’s supposed misdeeds.
That the turning point for Faye comes at her brother’s humiliation is uncomfortable, leading us to question our assumptions about right and wrong and what it means to be mentally stable if we lack compassion and kindness for others.
Like the best dark plays, the ‘happy’ ending is open to interpretation.
For me at least, Lie Low serves a dark cultural critique on the growing division between men and women fed on mutual anger and fear, which leaves no room for sensitivity.
Perhaps the allegory here is to resist falling for gendered arguments of who's right and who's wrong, and instead hold ourselves accountable to truth. Even if that means, unlike Faye, owning up to one’s delusions, rejecting bias and apologising for our indiscretions.
