Konstantin
Project Arts Centre, Dublin 2
★★★★☆
The play begins in complete darkness. Through headphones, each audience member hears a woman’s voice, tender but edged with distress. “I am someone who loves you,” she says.
The curtains open on a hospital room: sunlight falls through slatted blinds on to mustard walls and a linoleum floor. The woman sits on a chair beside the bed, speaking to the patient. We hear her from inside the binaural head that lies on the pillow, the titular Konstantin, our point of entry. This is not a play we watch from the seats but one we inhabit from within his fractured consciousness.
Directed by Eoghan Carrick and written by Lauren Jones, this inventive production from Once Off Productions and Cian O’Brien Arts asks what happens after Chekhov’s The Seagull. In the original play Konstantin is the tortured young writer whose offstage gunshot signals his suicide and closes the drama. This play asks, what if he did not die? Instead Konstantin lies in a coma as his friends and family gather around. They are the same characters reimagined in a modern world, continuing their dramas without him.
The conceit is bold, and the execution delivers. Peter Power’s intricate sound design makes uncanny use of the binaural set-up. Carrie Crowley is magnificent as Konstantin’s mother, a glittering actor with no maternal instinct. She admits she never wanted to spend time alone with her son, finding him too intense, and recruits others to dilute his company. Bosco Hogan is fascinating as the doctor, an RD Laing type whose LSD experiments in the 1970s explored how dying minds perceive time.
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His guilt about Konstantin’s fate, having known him since childhood and once flirted with his mother, adds a haunting counterpoint. The rest of the ensemble – John Cronin, John Doran, Genevieve Hulme-Beaman, Emily Kilkenny-Roddy and Sophie Lenglinger – weave a web of affairs, betrayals and artistic jealousies that border on parody while remaining sharply comic.
The dialogue sparkles. Jones’s script maintains a tight, bleakly comic tone, skewering artmaking, legacy and the tangled geometry of love triangles while nodding to contemporary debates about cancel culture and the tricky relationship between art and artist.
But as decades pass within Konstantin’s coma, the narrative begins to fray. We see events through his unsteady perspective, and it is often unclear where his fevered imagination ends and reality begins. Chaos creeps in, lucidity never fully returns and narrative threads are tied up hastily.
The ending feels rushed, plunging into visions of global despair, including climate catastrophe, underground bunkers for the super-rich and the rise of fascism. The play is never really about these issues, and it would have been stronger had it remained in an intimate register, observing these human dramas unfold rather than spinning out into a half-articulated commentary on the broader world.
Still, Konstantin is engrossing, ambitious and playful. It riffs on Chekhov without requiring prior knowledge, cleverly and surprisingly playing with his themes. The play sprawls but never bores. It remains intelligent, quick and cracklingly alive.
Runs at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, October 4th
