Terminus, Young Vic

Images by Ros Kavanagh

Mark O’Rowe is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary playwrights, and Terminus was first produced in 2007 by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It transferred to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 and is now being revived by the Abbey in an international tour. His play charts another ordinary night in Dublin city, but as this captivating triptych unfolds the events his characters - simply named A, B and C - describe are anything but. A man and two women deliver a series of overlapping monologues about love, sex, loss, regret and acts of shocking violence, but also of angels transporting souls to the afterlife, a demon made of worms and a pact made with the devil. The language - sparkling, funny and heightened - is poetic and fantastical, Molière meets magic realism.