Words, words, words. That is the chief impression left by this two-hander by Emmet Kirwan that won golden verdicts on its progress from Dublin’s Project Arts Centre to the Edinburgh fringe. But, while there is no denying its verbal energy, I was reminded of Carlyle’s comment on Macaulay’s conversation: that it was all very well for a while but that one wouldn’t choose to live under Niagara.
The play takes the form of a drug-fuelled odyssey through Dublin’s night-time – and the Joycean overtones are, I suspect, deliberate – over the course of a weekend. The pilgrim is a would-be DJ, Jason, who simply wants to practise his craft and get higher than a skyful of kites. But this Jason is the one who gets fleeced: he loses his job, his bike, his phone and his wallet. He does, however, take a lot of ketamine, drop in on several parties, have sex with his ex and finally attend a coastal rave. The only moving moments are his encounters with his brother, Daniel, a heroin addict living on the streets.
You could compile a long list of the play’s forebears. The syncopated speech echoes Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs. The idea of two actors playing multiple roles suggests Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets. The panoramic portrait of a city hints at Owen McCafferty’s Scenes from the Big Picture. But the problem is that Kirwan seems unsure what he feels about the world he portrays. The play emerges partly as a celebration of a rave-addicted Dublin youth culture on a perpetual binge. Yet there are also hints, in the meetings with Daniel, of regrets for a wasted life. In seeking to have it both ways, Kirwan sows only uncertainty.
In the end, you feel he is driven by a lust for language and there is no doubt he has a gift for a telling line. Spat out of one club, Jason describes his drugged-up state as: “Ten thousand butterflies tapping their wings on every vertebra of my spine.” But there is more to a play than words, and Kirwan piles on the phrases so thick and fast that many of them don’t make much sense. At one point he tells us that “the heat and noise of the city hits me face like a hot gush of piss”.
Kirwan, who has a lean, bird-like presence, plays Jason and the stockier Ian Lloyd Anderson takes a host of other roles, including the derelict Daniel who, for reasons never entirely clear, has thrown away an academic career. But although Phillip McMahon’s production is played on a bare stage, with the two actors frequently rapping into mics, it lacks genuine clarity as the words come hurtling at us in confusing profusion.
If Kirwan can harness his verbal power, he may yet write a play that offers more than a sensory impression.
- At the Dorfman, National Theatre, London, until 31 January. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
