Enlightenment
By: by Shelagh Stephenson
Series: The Abbey Theatre playscript series; Abbey Theatre playscript series
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2005
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] /
Number of pages: 98
Description: First staged at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 2005, 'Enlightenment' is a powerful study of the mechanisms of grief, identity and absence. When Adam disappears overseas, all his mother Lia and step-father Nick have is an email saying that he was thinking of going to Jakarta. The first act is the story of their grief, and their search for meaning or confirmation from a silent world. A vague medium and an invasive television producer do nothing to alleviate their harrowing uncertainty, and their hope that every time the phone rings, it might be Adam calling. Then a young man appears at the airport, looking uncannily like Adam, with his passport and amnesia in tow. As this version of Adam comes to live with Lia and Nick, the play, at first a delicate study of the psychology of loss, unravels into something dark and raw.