The first collaboration of Blue Raincoat Theatre Company and playwright Michael Harding brings out the best in neither. Blue Raincoat works in a highly choreographed style that varies so little, it usually barely matters what content they treat. Here, however, their style provides a crucible for a typically scatological and sexual explosion of male anxiety from Harding - which, because Niall Henry's production gives it no social or behavioural context, comes across as misogynist and classist.
A bedridden woman, Birdie, rambles about the man who has left her and the loneliness of her life. She is looked after by a portly butler and a crinolined maid, who take turns watching the outside world through an old-fashioned periscope. They hint that Birdie might have killed her lover with a razor. But no: after about half an hour he appears, a Victorian dandy in a red striped jacket and straw hat. Excretory functions and existential angst become prominent themes, which merge when Birdie dumps a ringing phone into her chamber pot. Just as we've come to accept this as a tired Huis Clos scenario, the man exits. All three remaining characters resume their positions on stage as the lights fade.
It is hard to know where and when we are: a few references to popular culture seem to place us in the present day, but the costumes and props point towards 100 years ago. If this production is making a point, it is that the leading man has the power, and that this is right and good: cliched symbols (the butler's rural Irish accent, the exaggerated hourglass shape of the nurse's costume, Birdie's abject status in the bed) mark them as objectified by and less privileged than the man, who gets off scot-free while the rest are left to suffer. As are the audience.
· Until March 20. Box office: 00 353 917 0431.
