At first it seems a touch perverse: Theatre 503 and the peripatetic Young Vic have joined forces to revive Conor McPherson's 1995 play to showcase a young director. Given the play consists of three intercut monologues, you might think it needed only minimal directing. But Yael Shavit, 23, does a good job of ratcheting up the suspense and reminding us that McPherson's odd trio remain alert to each other's stories.
As a text, it also highlights McPherson's strengths: his sense of place, eye for detail and sensitivity to Ireland's gregarious solitude. And all three combine in this account of a theft from a small Irish seaside town's resident bookie. Frank, the architect of the heist, must avenge his put-upon da. Joe, his sexually insecure younger brother, becomes the chief beneficiary of the raid. And Ray, a lecherous philosophy lecturer, is implicated because he happens to be driving by at the time.
In form, the play owes a lot to Brian Friel's Faith Healer: in tone, it apes the laconic style of the hard-boiled American thriller. But what McPherson brings out, as he later did in The Weir, is the quiet desperation of Irish small-town life. In the local bar, oldies forever argue about past republican splits. On the neighbouring campus, bored students get rat-arsed. Even in the disco, pink fluorescent tubing casts a sickly glow. In such an environment, crime becomes a tempting means of escape.
Shavit's production and Francis O'Connor's design pull a neat trick by suggesting the storytellers are inmates. At the same time the three actors feel free to take us into their confidence: most especially Keith Dunphy's Lucky Jim-like lecturer but also Michael Colgan's nervously chirpy Frank and Tom Vaughan Lawlor's scrawny, self-abusing Joe.
"No sound is dissonant which tells of life," wrote Coleridge in the poem of the play's title; and McPherson catches exactly the daily rhythms of Ireland's rainswept coastal pockets.
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