Enda Walsh’s plays are often about people trapped inside four walls. It seems logical, therefore, that he has created five monologues about lives defined by the character of specific rooms. Immaculately designed by Paul Fahy, the result is part art installation and part prose-poem. The audience is split into groups and journeys through five rooms in the Silk Street theatre, listening to the recorded voices of their inhabitants. It is rather like having your own private experience of Beckettian isolation.
Some rooms are more powerful than others. Ever since I first entered it at the Galway arts festival, I’ve been haunted by Room 303, which is set in a cheap hotel evoked through beige bedcovers and nondescript pictures. The voice we hear is that of Niall Buggy as a travelling salesman for God, confronting his disillusion, despair and death. What moves one is the contrast between the speaker’s capacity to leave total strangers “brimming with a new hope” over hot beverages and biscuits, and his own lifelong occupancy of rooms that feel like upholstered cells.
Many of the lives depicted have a similar desolation. In Kitchen, we listen as Eileen Walsh recounts a story of marital breakdown symbolised by the broken crockery within the shining cabinets. When we enter Bathroom, we are assailed by scented aromas and gleaming luxury as Paul Reid tells a tale of sibling jealousy. But there is a strange beauty about A Girl’s Bedroom, filled with fluffy toys and animal pictures, as Charlie Murphy describes the pervasive memory of her six-year-old self. The least successful for me is Office 33A, in which, despite the vivid image of musty desolation, the ear is pounded by an excess of words as Donal O’Kelly recalls a lost, irrecoverable love.
Collectively, however, there is a potency about these five pieces that take you inside other people’s heads. With constantly flickering lighting by Adam Fitzsimons and atmospheric sound by Helen Atkinson, they remind us that Walsh in all his work is fixated by solitary, hermetic characters for whom rooms are simultaneously refuges, prisons and spaces that inspire a yearning for escape.
At the Barbican’s Silk Street theatre, London, until 19 April.
