A decade or so ago, Declan Hughes wrote a bang-up thirtysomething zeitgeist play for Rough Magic Theatre Company, Digging for Fire, that had success at London's Bush Theatre as well as in Ireland. Shiver, his new play for Rough Magic, starts out feeling like an extension of that work: it is the story of two 40-ish couples living in the Dublin suburbs; one couple, Richard and Jenny, are deeply engaged in a dot.com startup, the other is negotiating Marion's career success and Kevin's problematic (she thinks) ambition to do nothing more than mind their baby son.
The dread phrase "Celtic Tiger" is never mentioned, but that's the territory Hughes is mining. He is documenting and sending up Ireland's go-go 1990s, where people had more money than sense, the welfare state is never even mentioned, and in Jenny's words: "The whole Irish thing is over." So far, so good. Hughes writes wonderful, insightful dialogue and is delving into aspects of contemporary Irish life that haven't been seen on stage before.
Lynne Parker moves her cast - Cathy Belton, Peter Hanly, Paul Hickey, and Cathy White, all superb - with elegance and simplicity around John Comiskey's stunningly atmospheric four-tier set. The first act climaxes in a beautifully orchestrated burst of action: "Seamus Heaney is made of tweed!" bursts out White as a very drunk Jenny then passes out from a standing position. Great stuff.
But, come the second act, Hughes loses control. Predictably, Jenny and Richard's online enterprise bottoms out; Marion and Kevin's financial life falls apart too, when her company goes bust having invested too heavily in the dot.com sector. Hughes clearly feels that the consumerist values that Ireland bought into are contemptible, but having all his characters bankrupted feels too extreme: are we meant to feel that they deserved this equally?
Various thematic strands are then uncertainly woven together through the male characters' life crises: Ireland's relationship to the past is brought in as Richard copes with his dying mother; Kevin, the source of whose angst is never clear, lapses into metaphorically overcharged delusions about St Mark's Gospel and greedy prospectors in the granite quarry. Inexplicably, a character is killed off in the 11th hour, while everyone else is pretty much forgiven and allowed to get on with their lives. Hughes, admirably, is grappling with confusing times in this play, and he can't have wished for a better production. But it's just not clear what he's trying to say.
· Until April 19. Box office: 00 353 1 881 9613.
