Tripping on drugs, 17-year-old Liam lies down on an empty road and sees his future flash before him. In John O’Donovan’s intricately structured new play for One Duck Theatre, the mystery of Liam’s final hours on a summer’s night in County Clare brings his three best friends together but also threatens to push them apart. In an empty shack on the edge of town, Cusack (Conor Madden), Barry (Colin Campbell) and Pa (Rhys Dunlop) gather to mark the 17th anniversary of Liam’s death. Playing a comically elaborate darts and drinking game, they tear through the cans and cocaine.
This could be a regression to their youthful selves for one night, but director Thomas Martin’s sensitive staging suggests a sense of arrested development; as if their bereavement is something they can’t get past. As in O’Donovan’s previous work, cracking male banter shifts into another mode, self-aware and raw.
In a flashback monologue, poignantly performed by Dunlop, Liam thinks about “all the things that I could do. All the ways it could turn out.” But with Cusack trapped in negative equity, Barry in a dead-end job and the sardonic Pa unemployed and newly homeless, the reality of the friends’ 30s is one of wasted or unfulfilled potential. Leaving it all behind, whether by emigration or suicide, is never far from their thoughts.
In O’Donovan’s dialogue, the seeping sadness is underscored by anger at the lack of opportunity for these men, in a town that was hollowed out by the Irish economic crash and still hasn’t recovered. While the plot has some dangling strands, the stellar performances and assured production do justice to a script that is pointed, unsentimental and surprisingly tender.
At Project Arts Centre, Dublin, until 8 February. Then at Omnibus theatre, London, 11-29 February.
