"Words, words, words," said Hamlet when asked by Polonius what he was reading. His phrase aptly sums up Enda Walsh's 60-minute play, much praised in Dublin and Edinburgh and now at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. It consists of a torrent of language and little in the way of dramatic action in the visible present.
The basic image is undeniably shocking: a father and daughter are trapped in a tiny bedroom with mottled, maroon, ultimately blood-marked walls. The daughter, stricken with polio as a child, talks incessantly and inhabits a romantic fantasy world derived from a Catherine Cookson novel. Meanwhile her father, who ironically craves quiet, noisily relives his progress from storeroom worker in a Cork furniture shop to salesman and ill-fated Dublin entrepreneur. His is a life littered with blood and violence. We are also asked to believe that, out of shame at his daughter's disability, he mewed her and her late mother up in ever smaller, tighter rooms.
Walsh is clearly attacking Irish capitalist excess - at one point the dad literally licked a client's arse to seal a deal - and the dated equation of bellicosity and masculinity. He also implies that the ultimate logic of the nuclear family is hermetic isolation. But practical, realistic questions, such as how the dead mother was disposed of, are suspended in order to sustain an overcalculated image. And, since the lives of father and daughter have been shaped entirely by the past, we are left with little in the way of dramatic development.
Walsh has a strong linguistic gift, and his visceral production boasts blistering performances from Liam Carney as the furious, furniture-obsessed dad and from Norma Sheahan as the daughter, who reveals that, "Words become my life as I try to fill the space." But just because Walsh's characters are confined to a domestic cell doesn't automatically prove his point that Ireland, like Hamlet's Denmark, is a prison.
· Until February 2. Box office: 020-7565 5000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
