Nightflowers

Journeying deep into a haunted interior, Bennett’s Nightflowers is buzzing with vivid, unforgettable images, colours and aromas: baroque tableaus of oranges rotting in the street or candlelit tables filled with resplendent dishes, as well as more mundane flashes of daily life: an irritatingly flimsy shower screen, or cardboard boxes overflowing with unwanted travel brochures.

Bennett’s new commission is especially poignant against a backdrop of the precarious and traumatic reality of housing in contemporary Ireland: the protagonist obsesses on having and not having a home, while gently mocking the conventions of domestic space, and how our lives and interactions are shaped by the four walls around us. Barely containing a lingering promise of violence and destruction, the nocturnal haze of Nightflowers sparkles with Bennett’s arrow-sharp prose.