Enda Walsh battles with contradictory instincts in this commission for the Cork Midsummer festival, co-produced by Asylum Productions. Walsh says the play is his way of coming to terms with the city that made his name: Cork was the setting and launchpad for Disco Pigs in 1996, but he grew disenchanted with it and moved to London several years ago.
This spirit of conciliation comes through in the play's loving, quirky, day-in-the-life quality: 18-year-old Jean makes her way through the city, taking the bus, working at Tesco, and naming all the streets, sights and buildings along the way. But the familiar, darker side of Walsh's imagination comes through in another layer of Jean's story: she is an obsessive-compulsive who has seizures when she walks through doorways and nurses an unhealthy interest in her ex-boyfriend, though he is getting married on the day the play depicts.
Donal Gallagher's production throws loads of theatricality at this narrative, but never makes it clear whether we are in Jean's head, an alternate reality, or a promotional video for Cork City gone wrong. The opening moments launch this confusion: Ailish Symons as Jean narrates the experience of falling to the ground as if she were outside her own body, watched by Domhnall O'Donoghue, who then dresses her as she stands like a puppet, revealing a bleeding gash in her side.
Just what O'Donoghue's presence is meant to convey is unclear: he looms over Symons, at one point assaults her and seems to become her, but he also serves a more basic function by popping in and out of Jean's story to play everyone she interacts with - her parents, workmakes, intense friend Eve, and loathsome ex Paul, among others.
However well executed, the production overextends what could have made an excellent 45-minute monologue, particularly given Symons' wonderfully subtle combination of doe-eyed innocence and scary intensity.
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