Reviewed: Braakland, Cork Midsummer Festival

THE HONESTY of intention and the integrity of vision with which director Lotte van den Berg and Compagnie Dakar created Braakland have to be applauded, as does the search which found the apocalyptic local landscape in which this open-air piece is set.

A journey by bus to an industrial estate and a short walk to a site abandoned by God and mankind, layered with detritus and spiked with disconnected rusted piping, with grass and weeds struggling through concrete crevices and around the shafts of buildings, half-demolished as if no-one had the heart to either build or destroy - all this is meant to disconnect the audience from the normal. Which indeed it does, although the dusk of this midsummer evening is defeated by a sky glowing with rose and turquoise.

Gradually figures emerge from the dismal shrubberies; a fire is lit, a hole is dug, a woman is raped in the distance and while this event is noticed by the silent and un-named characters there is no intervention. The eight people wander without discernible purpose through the site, appearing and disappearing, joining in some task or other, submitting - and this is the crucial narrative strand - to the power of the strong, or at least of the less weak.

But although the audience is obediently disconnected from its comfort zone, it is not drawn into this cataclysmic discomfort either.

The narrative becomes clear but not compelling; the geography itself imposes an emotional distance which is not bridged by mutual engagement even as the fire dies, the hole becomes a mass grave and the last woman standing buries herself in the sordid rubble.

What becomes of interest is how all this is done, how the spaces are managed, how the costumes are camouflage suggesting amoebic presences which suggests that as dust returns to dirty industrial dust, the grave is indisputably our goal.

It's bleak, and the applause is tentative; advised that one bus returns to the city in five minutes and the other in 25 there is a queue for the five-minute bus. There we can see that beyond the decaying shrubbery the sunset is reflected in suburban windows which blaze and shimmer in fervent ordinariness, although this is not the point.

Ends this evening, shows at 6.30pm and 8.30pm.