The opening moment is gorgeous: a young woman in a white dress swings back and forth over a rectangular plate of beaten copper, passing through a single beam of light. But the seeming innocence of this image also points to the overall problem of Roisin McBrinn's production: it goes too much for the simple idea and the emotional jugular when Fermin Cabal's script (in Robert Shaw's translation) calls for more complexity.
The young woman, Colorina, was one of the thousands who disappeared in Chile under Pinochet. Through her monologues, as well as the testimonies of four other women, we discover that she was tortured by the secret police, who were looking for her boyfriend, a Marxist student leader.
At first, hers and the other stories seem straightforward: Susan Fitzgerald appears next as a fellow detainee, who describes what life was like in prison. It is when a doctor, played by Jane Brennan, insists that Colorina had not been mistreated in prison that Cabal's project starts to emerge: his subject is as much the misuse of language and the manipulation of truth as the revelation of the horrors that happen under a dictatorship.
McBrinn backs away from the theatrical possibilities of this by presenting each of the women in the same way: alone on stage, addressing the audience directly. This places confidence in the audience's ability to listen and make their own judgments, but also shows an apparent belief that via such testimony, the truth can eventually be reveaked and vindicated; an attempted final coup de theatre further extends this idea.
But in the age of testimony theatre and other, more sophisticated, approaches to political theatre, this one feels naive. It also places enormous weight on individual performances, not all of which stand up to the challenge. Ger Ryan fares best with the most emotionally direct story, of a gravedigger facing her worst nightmare. B*spoke Theatre Company's production values are, as ever, impressive, but the event feels intellectually incomplete.
· Until July 23. Box office: 00 353 1 881 9613.
