Peter Crawleyreviews Breaking Outat the Axis Arts Centre, Dublin
Breaking Out
Axis Arts Centre, Dublin
"I'm going to drink again and that's okay," says Arthur Riordan, exuding a nervous energy that suggests otherwise. The opening line of Declan Lynch's novel, The Rooms, which the writer has now adapted for the stage as a monologue, is more blunt: "If I go in here and have this drink, I will die."
The effect, though, is roughly the same. His words are a deliberate perversion of the supportive assertion of his AA meetings ("I'm an alcoholic and that's okay"), and, after more than seven years sober, the speaker, Neil, has decided to leap off the wagon. This could be called Prelude to a Pint.
Lynch chronicles Neil's drinking as though the tail end of the 20th century is simply a reel of blurry highlights, the details of politics, wars or elaborate papal conspiracies all distended by Dublin boozers and now decanted by Riordan in a bravado surge of recollection over the onstage guitar accompaniment of Niall Toner.
Plumbing deeper than heroic drinking stories or roads to recovery, Lynch is attempting to anatomise a culture. Just as Alan Clarke's sparing set gives this remote west of Ireland bar the imposing dimensions of an altar (where a pint of Smithwicks resembles a communion chalice), so alcohol is presented not just as a social lubricant or a sexual icebreaker, but as a religious ritual. Bars, like churches, are the places where spirits flow freely.
For a while Breaking Outmight seem like a cautionary tale or a temperance fable. "We're all addicted to something," imparts Neil, like a man flirting with temptation before pulling back from the brink. Lynch's tone, though, is much more sour and because Riordan is a naturally charming presence, it doesn't immediately register that he is playing a toxically self-involved music bore.
A one-time "rock'n'roll guitar hero" now turned struggling musical composer, Neil is an inveterate name-dropper (The Pogues, Leonard Cohen and Mick Jagger are all mentioned), easily moved to consuming jealousy by the success of his still-drinking friends, and more obsessed by Jamaica - a standard-issue muse and his new intoxicant - than by the son he has abandoned to a failed marriage.
Although director Michael James Ford is inclined to indulge the rock'n'roll reverie, Toner's unadorned guitar compositions, threaded through the narration, make that dream seem more wistful. It helps to preserve a mood somewhere between morose and jocose, and you helplessly feel for this fragile figure, steadily unsettled by what he justifies as "okay", unexpectedly horrified by the chilling word, "cheers".
Last show tonight
PETER CRAWLEY
