It is possible to read multiple metaphors into what was Eugene Ionesco's third play, from the decline of old age to the human need for companionship and even to the failure that life must be for all of us. An elderly couple living in a round tower on a sea-swept island seem to have taken to playing a series of games of "let's pretend" to keep themselves occupied and in touch: it seems to be easier for them than recalling fading and uncertain memories from two very long lives of nearly 100 years each. He calls himself the caretaker and she is his doting wife, perhaps.
He wants to deliver a "message" before they both depart this life and must employ an orator to deliver it for him. The delivery is to be to an assembly of friends and dignitaries, scientists and property owners. As the door-bell keeps ringing, the couple bring chairs into the room to seat their invisible guests as they arrive and are greeted.
But, as the author wrote to the director of the first Paris production, the subject of the play is not the message, nor the old couple, nor the failure of life: the subject of the play is nothingness - the nothingness which sits on all those empty chairs, which threatens to crowd the couple out of their small living space. To make this persuasive theatrically, it is necessary to make the nothingness real, and here director Theresia Guschlbauer and her two actors, Peter Dix and Peg Power, do not wholly succeed. The characterisations are sincere, sustained and committed but the timing and the physical techniques do not ultimately achieve what Ionesco requires.
In the Civic Theatre in Tallaght on Monday night, the audience was left to conjure for itself the images of the people being greeted and seated: the timing of the snatches of dialogue, the miming of the greeting and seating, were not sufficiently precise to leave no doubt about the reality of those invisible elements. But this could tighten up as the Galloglass tour continues around the country.
Runs from Thursday to Saturday in the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny, then tours to Cork, Longford, Gorey, Kiltimagh, Galway, Charleville, Skibbereen, Thurles and Portlaoise. Information on 052-26797
