Sick Festival: Lippy, The Old Market, Upper Market Street, Hove, Friday, March 20 and Saturday, March 21

BACK in the early summer of 2000 the bodies of three middle-aged sisters and their elderly aunt were found barricaded in their rented home in Leixlip, a suburb of Dublin.

An inquest the following year found the four had apparently decided to starve themselves to death.

Although Dead Centre’s performance Lippy is inspired by the event which was reported across the world, director Ben Kidd is keen to stress the piece is not trying to explain what happened.

“We realised there is no answer to this story,” he says. “There is nothing we can draw from it that makes for a satisfying closing speech or narrative.

“We are left with the meaninglessness of what happened. The search for narrative is what theatre does, whatever story you’re dealing with generally language is used to describe what happens and to move things along. There is an obsession with why people do these things. We can’t try to tell a story which is so flabbergasting and extraordinary.”

Rather than trying to recount what happened in that house – which no one knows – Kidd says the piece is a response to the event.

It grew out of writer Bush Moukarzel’s interest in doing a play about lip-reading – combined with an ongoing interest in turning the shocking story into a piece of theatre.

“The more you find out about lip-reading, the more intriguing detail there is,” says Kidd. “The key thing is there is an ambiguity – lip reading is by no means an exact science. It’s a way of trying to see what people are thinking from what they are saying.”

The production opens somewhat confusingly with a post-show discussion involving a lip-reading expert, before the Leixlip family begins to swallow up the performance.

“The women won’t speak so we are constantly playing with the audience’s anticipation of what they might say,” says Kidd.

As with all Dead Centre’s shows the final production was created by the team of Kidd, Moukarzel and sound designer Adam Welsh.

One major aspect of the original story which the production plays on is the extensive document shredding the family carried out before their death – almost as an attempt to wipe out their existence.

“It’s an extraordinary detail,” says Kidd. “It contains within it a sense of privacy. It underlines the idea that it was a decision they chose to do, which they didn’t want to be interpreted, so they didn’t leave any evidence or trace of who they were.”

All the information about the family contained in the play comes from the public domain – a few shreds of evidence, text and personal belongings.

“Where they lived in Leixlip was part of the Celtic Tiger boom,” says Kidd. “They lived near Hewlett Packard and Intel factories, among those people who worked in these huge factories providing the tools of communication, but they were completely uncommunicative.

“But they seemed to have a friendship and camaraderie, a closeness which is impressive. We haven’t set out to make a social media comment, although that technology of sound permeates through the whole show. They are people who made a little mausoleum of themselves, sheltered themselves away from the outside world. I don’t know if that would have happened in the era of Facebook.

“I hope that people can potentially draw from the show that a level of mystery exists between all of our relationships. We don’t know why the women did this extraordinary thing, but we have this belief that we are able to access the inner workings of ourselves and other people. We have no idea why we do things from one moment by moment, we’re basically trying to put one foot in front of the other and stay alive.”

Starts 8pm, tickets £12/£10. Call 01273 699733.