Mark O'Rowe is a playwright known for profanity and urban grit - hardly a natural choice for the middle-class Gate. This world premiere also marks the Gate directing debut of Tony-winner Garry Hynes. Having seen this play, I am still wondering what about it brought these powerful forces together?
Yes, O'Rowe can write. We have known that since Howie the Rookie, his 1999 play at London's Bush, composed in a staccato near-poetry that is now his signature style. But while there are some beautiful passages in Crestfall, there is no sign of advance either in style, form or subject matter: he has merely turned up the dials on the brutal, scatological anthem he has been playing from the start.
The violence here extends to the animal kingdom: a horse is tortured to death and a three-eyed dog nearly rapes one of the narrators with his foot-long appendage.
O'Rowe's main subject matter until now has been the crisis of masculinity, and the degradation of women is one of the ways he has communicated this. But until now his women have remained off stage.
This is a play about motherhood: all three female characters are, or want to be, mothers, and the principal plot concerns the secret parentage of the hooker Olive's son. When Olive and her lover Inchy meet a gory end at the butt of her husband Jungle's shotgun, the smack addict Tilly becomes a replacement mother for the child Poppin-eye.
O'Rowe describes a society so calcified by violence that people are reduced to the most basic activities: having sex, killing and shooting up. But making the bonding of (surrogate) mother and child the play's final image is a conservative cop-out: aren't traditional roles part of the society that O'Rowe is going to such extremes to condemn? What is crucially missing here is humour: the tone is so serious that it is impossible to take the ludicrous events the play describes seriously.
Hynes's presentation of the material is uncompromisingly lurid: Francis O'Connor's set of dirty, tilted mirrors turns the Gate stage into a theatrical porn palace around which three fine actresses (Aisling O'Sullivan, Marie Mullen and Eileen Walsh) strut. But we leave with no enlightenment, no enjoyment and no message. The biggest mystery is why a woman as smart as Hynes got within a million miles of this empty material.
· Until June 7. Box office: 00 353 1 874 4045.
