Irish Times reviewers on Crestfall at the Gate and Run For Your Wife at the Olympia.

Crestfall

Gate Theatre

By Fintan O'Toole

Those of us whose childhoods unfolded in the era before boredom was outlawed may remember the phrase: "Tell us a picture." When all conversation had dried up and all activities had been exhausted, you recounted, with your own elisions and exaggerations, the story of a film you'd seen. I'm not sure if Mark O'Rowe remembers the same injunction, but in his new play he tells us a picture.

Not a pretty picture, either. If Crestfall was indeed a movie, it would probably be banned. The story it tells features brutal sex, bestiality, the public torturing of a horse and a climax of such extreme violence that it makes Reservoir Dogs seem like a Hallmark Mother's Day card. The three women who recount it are a nymphomaniac, a whore and a mother - a pretty comprehensive set of the old female stereotypes. And the world in which it is set is a "savage quarter" halfway between Mad Max and the Irish midlands, a surreal amalgam of nameless housing estate and gothic post-apocalyptic landscape.

Yet Crestfall is also a highly sophisticated and serious piece of theatre and, in Garry Hynes's electrifying production, a completely convincing one. The three narrators who occupy the stage in turn and tell a single story from overlapping perspectives may operate like movie cameras taking shots from different angles. In their narratives they "scope" and "click", moving from wide shots to close-ups. But the piece is nevertheless quintessentially theatrical. It hovers on the borderline between showing and telling in a way that is utterly dependent on the dangerous live presence of three superb actors.

What makes Crestfall such an important escape from the monologue form that has become such a cliché in contemporary Irish theatre, indeed, is O'Rowe's theatrical exploration of a world that is drenched in cinematic imagery. Within a short 70 minutes and the apparently simple form of a three-handed narrative, he is actually weaving in and out of four different ways of telling a story: cinema, short story, theatrical performance and epic poetry.

The most obvious parallels are with the late Beckett plays and with the social surrealism of Jim Cartwright's Road. But, although these influences are undoubtedly present, Crestfall, for all its lurid details and occasionally foul language, is actually rather close in form and intent to The Playboy of the Western World. A line in that play, Pegeen's remark that "there's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed" is also the best summary of Crestfall. The play is not about squalor and violence, it's about the great gap between the reality of human degradation and the heroic glamour that representations of brutality acquire in our culture.

To enter this gap safely, O'Rowe puts on the armour that has served writers so well throughout theatrical history: stylised, poetic language. His text is hypnotically rhythmic, and highly artificial, using a language wrenched from its colloquial roots, but still clear and concise enough to bear the narrative weight. This is utterly crucial to the distancing effect that he requires. It makes Crestfall no more, nor no less, violent than, say, Medea. The vicious story is held in constant tension with the cool, rigorous form.

No less crucial, though, is the tone of the production. The tension between showing and telling demands an absolute clarity of purpose from the actors. They need to embody enough of the action to make the play live as a piece of theatre, but not so much as to tip the balance into vulgar bathos. And under Garry Hynes's remarkably supple direction, Aisling O'Sullivan, Marie Mullen and Eileen Walsh do so magnificently.

The ground is laid by the brilliantly integrated interaction of Francis O'Connor's unsettling hall-of-mirrors set, Rupert Murray's lighting and Paul Arditti's creepy sound design, all of which combine to create a bubble of time and place. It has its own reality that is never literal, but is nonetheless unsettling.

Within this eerie space, the passion of the narrators tells us that the story is true, but the surroundings deny us the comfort of verifying that this is so. There are no external reference points, just the voices and movements of the actors. And all three occupy the space with startling conviction, even as they enter it from very different angles. O'Sullivan is full of a feline yearning that carries an undertone of threat, Mullen warm but wary, Walsh vulnerable, but with the indefatigability of a survivor.

Between them, they exert an unbreakable hold. What is essentially a highly complex exercise in form gains a ferocious immediacy. Crestfall becomes deeply shocking, not for the lurid content of the story, but for the insidious mastery with which that story overcomes our repulsion and acquires an epic, almost mythic status. Which is precisely what this brave and accomplished play wants to do to us, raising as it does so some urgent questions about our culture.

Runs until June 7th

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Run For Your Wife

Olympia Theatre

By Gerry Colgan

The genre of the West End farce has no lofty ambitions towards intellectual satire or emotional conquest - unless the generation of laughter fits into the latter category. That depends on how well it is written and performed, and author Ray Cooney can claim eminence in the field. He has created over 30 comedies, and has had numerous worldwide successes.

On the matter of performance, the most prominent element in this production is the casting of some of the actors from Fair City. Most of these honed their talents on the live stage before becoming household names on TV, and their experience shows profitably in matters of versatility and timing. They offer saucy laughter in abundance.

The plot is slick, a typically fast-moving affair of comic adultery, policemen with their theories in a twist and men whose sexuality is put under an erratic spotlight. A taxi driver, who maintains two apartments and keeps a wife in each, manages his complicated life by manipulation of the shift system. He has an accident and has to spend a night in hospital, and down crashes his house of cards.

Well, not immediately. He puts up a brave fight to avoid exposure, the cops come a-calling, a lodger gets drawn into the mess, the wives are totally confused and an outrageously gay neighbour takes a hand in making one of the apartments seem like a den of perversion. One wife, a leggy brunette, is cast, without her knowledge, as a transvestite named Lofty. The pace is maintained right up to the abrupt ending.

Mark O'Regan directs (and acts) with a sure touch, and is rewarded with bubbling portrayals from Claudia Carroll, Rebecca Smith, Seamus Power, Arthur Riordan, Alan Barry and Tony Tormey, the latter good, but not yet quite in the groove as the taxi driver. In sum, however, the play and its team deliver on the promise of laughter, and that's the battle won.

Runs until June 28th.