It rarely behoves a critic to betray total ignorance, but during the interval of this play I had to come clean when two French women asked me what it was about, fearing themselves victims of a language barrier. But no, this new script by Dermot Healy deliberately hovers shy of subject, plot or even a coherent conversation, with a set of indeterminate Pirandelloesque "characters" who might or might not be wraiths in the frazzled memory of old Mr Staines. Staines prefaces the piece by wandering around in his underpants listening to an old Count John McCormack record.
Wilful obscurity has served the Pan Pan company well in the past, thanks to a highly individual troupe of both hearing and deaf actors: not least the intense, manic presence of Charlie Kelly. Kelly appears here - alongside a cast of big-stage actors - as "the manager"; a mute, disinterested presence, who every so often operates stage machinery to bring a "yard-arm" crashing down, narrowly missing the actors.
Meanwhile, Staines and a younger, lustier Mister MacGregor alternatively dominate and niggle each other, bickering over the "fourth wall" and the non-existent curtain - while Staines as older actor/convict/hospital inmate more often browbeats MacGregor's more fuddled young identity.
The two are regularly contradicted or prompted by the off-stage voices of two women. In the second act, the women replace the men onstage, when the men's offstage remarks prove the only direct interaction. Again, there is an older and a younger women, apparently a mother and her rebellious but emotionally dependent daughter.
What vaguely emerges is an unhappily unresolved marriage or affair between the younger and older heterosexual pairs - but there's no getting to the bottom of it, and no great fascination to the mystery either. Certainly, there are lyrical passages - about solitude, memory, interconnectedness, sexual fantasy among couples - but these quickly subside into arhythmic, sub-Beckettian routines, which frustrate any meaning, leaving little more than four-letter words forming in my mind.
Director Gavin Quinn has imposed some of his odd style and modernist tropes on a cast who show extraordinary commitment: Harry Towb's impish old goat, Staines: Ronan Leahy's earnestly gormless MacGregor; Fedelma Cullen's powerfully melodramatic Mother; and Suzanne Robertson's interestingly forthright performance as Gloria - five characters in search of far more interesting material.
***** Unmissable
**** Recommended
*** Enjoyable
** Mediocre
* Terrible
