Still reeling from the international success of Martin McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy, Druid Theatre Company is running on middlebrow autopilot. Its latest offering is a sweet, predictable monologue about a kooky fortysomething woman who is thrown into crisis when her husband leaves her. But no amount of staging tricks from director Garry Hynes - and, boy, are there a lot of them - can cover up the thinness of Geraldine Aron's script, which hovers persistently at surface level. And American actress Glenne Headly's jerky-quirky performance style merely adds one layer of eccentricity too many.
Angela Kennedy Lipsky is an Irish-American who is married to an Englishman and lives in London. He deserts her for his Mexican girlfriend, their daughter leaves soon after to take a flat with a friend, and Angela is alone for the first time in her adult life. She puts lonely hearts ads in London's Time Out magazine, buys a vibrator, phones suicide hotlines, and tosses out one-liners: "Fifty is the new 30", "A man who says he likes small hands is trying to make his penis look bigger." From the first moment that she mentions her handsome GP, who accommodates her hypochondria so forgivingly, we know exactly how this story is going to end.
It's refreshing to see a solo show that engages with a woman's inner life (there's a glut of male monologues on the Irish stage these days), but the balance here feels too weighted towards storytelling and punchlines, rather than emotional exposure and growth. The fault lies partly in Headly's performance: the few moments during which she breaks down and shows us how she's really feeling simply don't convince.
The production is beautifully staged, though, and slick in the extreme, featuring no fewer than three rounds of real fireworks, gorgeous carpeting, a backdrop of twinkling stars, and props that skim on and off stage on tracks. Local favourite Aron has had many successes over the past 20 years with Druid, and Hynes is a world-class director, but neither is challenging herself here.
· Until December 8. Box office: 00 353 91 569777.
