Rodney Lee's first play is small in scale but generous in ambition, involving characters who behave badly but whom the audience are intended to like. And it has a sitcom-like structure through which he tries to convey some serious ideas. On a surface level, the play is well structured and successfully brings all three characters to a point of crisis at the same time, but the whole piece doesn't come together in a satisfying way. Neither the writing nor Jim Culleton's flat production fully pulls off the attempted sad-funny tone; what results is melodrama.
Orla (Amy Conroy) is a misfit film student trying to finish a pretentious project about a broken doll. Her handsome classmate Liam (Paul Reid) is helping her, an act of selfishness masquerading as generosity since his motive is to make his ex-girlfriend jealous. The least credible character is Orla's father Gerard, who over-invests in his daughter's life to compensate for guilt about his wife's death.
There is an awkward attempt here to create comedy out of co-dependency: one of the play's many plot lines involves Gerard's extended lie to Orla about having cancer, which comes across as more creepy than funny. The excellent actor Philip O'Sullivan struggles valiantly to bring some interest to Gerard's character, but it adds up to little more than a bunch of nervous tics. Lee appears, at times, to be attempting a meta-theatrical comment on storytelling, which may explain the contrived way he hustles one character after another off the stage to allow interplay between the other two. If this is a parody of staginess, however, Culleton's production seems to take it at face value.
· Until March 11. Box office: 00 353 1 881 9613.
