The Gap Year – a trio of women take time out and learn to let go and choose change over stagnation (Lyric Theatre until Sunday 2 March)

The times, they are a-changin’ for three women in their sixties. Kate has just said goodbye to her husband who dropped dead in the bread aisle of the local supermarket. Oonagh’s still vexed about her man walking out twenty years ago to be with Flora the florist, and now he has the temerity to want to get married again. And Roisin has been the one caring for everyone else in her family for decades but now realises that she doesn’t have long left before her health will reshape what she’s able to do.

The trio head off on a holiday that turns into a year-long pilgrimage around every county in Ireland. It’s a story about facing up to loss, making choices, and opening your arms wide to whatever life throws at you.

Carol Moore’s performance anchors this restaging of The Gap Year. Her Kate can be a sullen, stubborn, withdrawn and crabby curmudgeon. But when she lowers her guard, the widow can catch herself on and her empathy bursts through.

Oonagh is the first of the three to truly let her hair down – much to the audience’s delight – and Marion O’Dwyer allows that moment to gradually reform her character’s sense of victimhood and take control of her life’s narrative.

Libby Smyth plays Roisin who at first acts as the buffer between the feistier Kate and Oonagh before Smyth brings her character’s vulnerability to the fore with a health condition that can no longer be hidden or ignored.

It’s great to see Moore, O’Dwyer and Smyth back in the roles they played when The Gap Year first graced the Lyric Theatre’s main stage back in 2022. And it’s a script that had been workshopped through the Lyric’s New Work programme prior to Covid.

Few plays are written – never mind staged – that revolve around the lives of older women. Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine shouldn’t count: she’s only 42 when she jets off to Greece. It’s hard not to connect with Clare McMahon’s script that integrates so many different ways in which changes of identity can be pivotal in people’s lives. We all know about failure, hope for success, have loved and also lost.

While the three travellers are back, the other three multi-roled parts have been recast. They provide the colour for the three women’s visits to different towns and counties. Stroke survivor Pat may not have many words to share, his slow and deliberate interactions are another reminder that there are so many gaps the kind of stories that theatre normally depicts.

Shaun Blaney brings comedy to so many scenes as a diffident campsite activity coordinator (who utters one of the most memorable lines: “we’re all in the queue [for death]”), a savvy campervan salesman who meets his match in Kate (and allows a huge prop – though a good bit more compact than the first run – to be wheeled around the stage), and lothario Fionntan in Dingle who has the audience in almost as much of a flutter as Oonagh. But it’s his portrayal of Ethan in a Dublin club – in some ways quite unconvincing, yet verbally totally packed with emotion – and his sharing of a coming out story with Carol that opens the door for the play’s conclusion.

Playwright Clare McMahon takes on the remaining female characters for this run. There’s a nurse who is equally full of kindness and sadness. A new mum who is at the end of her tether with a toddler. A fervent nun who has known huge sadness and loss but hasn’t learned that her pious answer may not fit everyone else’s experience. And a drunk girl whose tear-stained conversation in the women’s toilet provides Kate with another nudge towards self-reflection.

Stuart Marshall’s two-level set brings out the richness of Irish countryside, and Rosie McClelland’s sharp costumes match the earthy hues and the provide a sense of passing seasons. As well as crafting a motif that almost acts as a theme tune for the play, Garth McConaghie’s soundscape plays with reverberation (the funeral mass and visit to New Grange particularly atmospheric) and the off-stage sound of wildlife and flushing toilets.

The long first half is rewarded with a much brisker second act. Streamlined storytelling often applies the mantra of ‘start late, leave early’ and many scenes in The Gap Year practice the former but might benefit from dropping the last line or two of dialogue and not reinforcing what the audience have already learned. Given the inescapable sense of loss that surrounds the story, director Benjamin Gould serves up lots of moments of levity – not least fulsome osculation – and keeps everyone in character as they push elements of the set off into the wings.

Having seen and reviewed the play back in 2022, I do miss the original cast. It’s a sign of the quality of what they achieved that their stamp on the colourful characters is hard to erase. But there’s much to admire in Doran, Blaney and McMahon’s reinterpretation of the mannerisms and energy that knits together the people and the situations that the travelling troika need to encounter to make it back home.

You can catch The Gap Year at the Lyric Theatre until Sunday 2 March.

Photo credit: Ciaran Bagnall

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