A review of A Prelude to a Death in Venicein Kilkenny Castle.

A Prelude to a Death in Venice (Harvey's Version)

The Parade Tower, Kilkenny Castle

Take a shaggy dog story, allow it the wayward development of a stray pup and the confused pedigree of a plucky mongrel, and you may end up with something like A Prelude to a Death in Venice (Harvey's Version), from the maverick mind of radical American writer and director Lee Breuer.

That title, with its nods to high culture and pop culture, its allusions, revisions and partial explanations, maps out the strange journey of Mabou Mines's production. Breuer's play may have once owed something to Death in Venice, but it seems unlikely that Thomas Mann would recognise any remnants of his novella here.

It is the tale of a jilted dog, named Rose (performed by an exceptionally expressive puppet), who sings an erotic revenge fantasy (through a suite of original blues songs) directed at her homeless former owner, John (who happens to be played by a three-foot-tall actor).

The version that has premiered at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, stemming from a film adaptation commissioned by Harvey Keitel and set in California's Venice Beach, has become such a forest of idiosyncratic embellishments, associations and developmental detours that it is almost impossible to find our way back to any source.

This, one feels, is how Breuer likes it.

Rose is his most fully realised character, sung beautifully by Bernadine Mitchell, who warmly regards her puppet counterpart, gracefully manipulated by Matthew Acheson, Deanna Acheson, Emily DeCola and Jessica Scott. The attention and affection lavished on Rose - our narrator - doesn't serve Nic Novicki particularly well, however, who is left stranded between two payphones, placing calls to "Johns Anonymous" and engaging in an unwieldy, self-involved spiel that revolves around puns, psychosexual concerns, metaphysical enquiries and gender politics.

"Am I going over your head?" he asks every so often, and, given that his monologues are delivered in alternating impersonations of Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino, my response was invariably, "Yes - by about three feet."

Somewhere in this anarchic, playful and quite considered jumble, is a fable about co-dependence, narcissism, revenge and perhaps even animal rights. Smart but flip, infuriating as he is invigorating, Breuer's piece is as prescriptive and liberating as a Rorschach inkblot: you get out of it what you put in. - Peter Crawley