An international hit since its 2007 Abbey Theatre debut, Mark O'Rowe's Terminus has found favour in most quarters – save, I suspect, the Dublin tourist board. Its account of one long, dark night of the soulless shared by two women and a homicidal maniac paints a ghastly if gripping picture of the Irish capital – a city of loneliness, betrayal and subterranean violence. But this grim vista is redeemed by the expansiveness of O'Rowe's supernatural vision, and by his beat-poetic script, a drummed threnody to the beautiful and the damned.
Directed by the writer, Terminus is a feat of storytelling, not of drama, in which three narratives loom out of a murky, shattered-glass frame. The first recounts an ex-teacher's attempt to rescue her pupil from a brutal back-street abortion. In the second, that woman's estranged daughter falls from the arm of a crane and is plucked from certain death by a winged fugitive from Hades. Think Orpheus and Eurydice. Think It's a Wonderful Life. Then think Psycho: monologue three is delivered by a shy bachelor turned sociopath, who's sold his soul to Satan in exchange for a mellifluous voice. He can now sing up a storm, and might, if he weren't so busy butchering his sexual conquests and carving up "fuckheads" in a car park.
Some of the play's grislier episodes require a strong stomach, and it's not always clear what, beyond schlock value, all this unpleasantness achieves. The play's three mesmerising tales conjure with life and death, heaven and hell – but have little profound to say about them. The satisfying effect of Terminus's neatly circular plotting, meanwhile, is no substitute for meaning.
But who needs substance when the surface is this dazzling? It's a tribute to the potency of O'Rowe's writing that dramatic action isn't – as per so much monologue theatre – conspicuous by its absence. The language is brilliant, a vertiginous concatenation of assonance and rhyme ("nipples poking, evoking so prevailing a craving, I'm quaking"), whose rhythm remains limber enough to let the play – and its audience – breathe.
As the lonely young woman saved by her love for a creature constructed entirely of worms, Catherine Walker is (perhaps understandably) breathless and over-emotive. Declan Conlon's latterday Faust, a butter-wouldn't-melt murderer with a Lockets habit, and Olwen Fouéré's bereft mother are perfectly pitched in a lower key. Terminus is a luridly compelling waking nightmare of Dublin as an eighth circle of hell.
