Lars Noren's 1995 play is a strange and challenging commentary on the inhumanity of contemporary political conflicts. His message is that modern war is so horrible that it warps its survivors permanently, a point he underlines by breaking many of the unwritten rules of psychological drama. While the play initially seems to be written as naturalism, it quickly starts to pile on improbable coincidences, extreme behaviours, and over-narration of its thematic connection to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.
The main characters, Rosa and Eric Sabato, are former Chilean dissidents who escaped the Pinochet regime but were forced to leave their seven-year-old son behind. The play is set in Paris, 30 years after their escape, and initially, it seems that both are ready to move on; Rosa has written a book about their painful past, and Eric has started an affair with a younger man who, portentously, refers to their relationship as having a father-son quality.
Rosa also meets and is drawn to the young man, and events escalate to a revelation scene in which Noren pushes the edge of credibility. An effective production would establish an atmosphere of foreboding that would coax the audience to buy into the accumulating plot twists and intertextual references.
Annabelle Comyn's staging for Hatch Productions does not meet this challenge, largely because of undercasting: as Rosa and Eric, Ingrid Craigie and Conor Mullen do not move convincingly out of initial presentations of their characters as underwrought and emotionally deadened, and there is not much sense of the complicated emotional interdependence between them.
Peter Gaynor mostly plays one note of petulance as the crux figure, Luca, though all come into their own a bit too late, in a scene where real identities are revealed and the emotional fur flies.
· Until December 3. Box office: 00 353 1 881 9613.
