As he proved at London's Gate theatre with Marathon and Cuckoos, Colin Teevan is a first-rate translator. But his new play at the Cottesloe Theatre, The Walls, feels like a piece of dated Dublin Ionesco. In applying the techniques of 1950s Absurdism to middle-class Irish life Teevan allows the play's spontaneous energy to be crushed under the weight of an oppressive symbolism.
The title itself has a double significance. The action takes place on Christmas Eve in the Walls's Dublin home as they await the arrival of their exiled son, Joseph, and his English wife Mary. When the pair turn up a crippled, paedophiliac Jesuit neighbour greets them, just in case we missed the point, with the cry: "No room at the inn!" Teevan's idea that Dublin life is filled with flaws is visually embodied by the disappearance of the house's walls. There are even references to the missing fourth wall with the mother's apprehensive glances at the audience.
It is perfectly legitimate to expose the hypocrisies of the Irish middle-classes, but I am staggered by the programme's claim that this is new territory - writers such as Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard and Conor McPherson have all been there before. The problem is that Teevan builds his symbolic edifice on the shakiest realistic foundations. We learn a little about the Walls: we hear of the collapse of the father's underpants factory, the loss of his investments owing to Joseph's fiscal ineptitude and discover the incestuous consequences of the mother's adultery. But instead of allowing the symbolism to grow out of observed reality, Teevan imposes it from the start, so that the characters seem like walking abstractions.
And yet the plays Teevan has translated took the opposite approach; the metaphorical meaning of Marathon arose naturally from the characters' obsessive running. Here one admires the visual ingenuity of Mick Gordon's production and Dick Bird's design, and one feels sorry for the actors left trying to put flesh on a series of authorial pawns. Clare Higgins embodies maternal survival tactics against the odds, Michael Culkin is her plumply complacent husband, and Tony Rohr a raffish civil servant. They work hard but they are up against Teevan's perverse theatrical structure. He appears to have started with the message he wished to convey, then found the characters who would illustrate it.
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