In Ella Hickson’s play Oil (presented by Black Swan State Theatre Company in 2022), May tells her daughter Amy – as she sends Amy’s undesirable boyfriend packing – that it is her job to protect Amy’s future from “the passions of the present.”

Watching Kate Mulvany’s semi-autobiographical play The Seed it becomes obvious that this parental duty hasn’t been fulfilled in the three generations of the lives of its protagonists.

Geoff Kelso in The Seed. Photo © Daniel J Grant

Ostensibly this is a story about a family preparing to celebrate three birthdays. Rose Maloney has travelled from Australia with her father Danny (a Vietnam vet) to be with her unmet (as yet) grandfather Brian (a former IRA paramilitary), domiciled near Robin Hood’s Nottingham forest. Danny’s four brothers – Colm, Malachy, Paddy and Trevor – are to join them later.

That this is going to be an unhappy gathering is conveyed to us early in video of barbed wire fencing which floods across the stage. On this barbed wire, the Danny (as an adolescent) seems to be hanging by his blooded hand. Danny’s description of his eventual brutal rescue by a policeman with...