At one level, Dermot Bolger's fascinating new play is the story of a haunting. At an altogether different level, it might be taken as a metaphor for the rescue of a Catholic soul from some kind of living purgatory. Or maybe it is a kind of allegory about a dysfunctional materialistic society, larded with social comment (some of it straight forwardly didactic and some glancingly satirical) about scandal and inequality. Different audiences may take different messages from its complex and often uneasy mix of the real and the surreal.
Jerome Furlong from Carlow wanted to be an architect building cathedrals and has turned out to be an unfeeling and commercially successful purveyor of advertising jingles. When discovered, he is arriving at a flat in a Ballymun tower whence his brother, Derek, is about to depart for London to see if his partner can stage a successful art show there. Jerome pays the rent because he uses the premises for illicit sexual encounters with Clara, who works in his office.
The flat is said to be haunted by the poltergeist ghost of a young boy who hanged himself in the bedroom and who now seems determined to haunt Jerome, even to the point of inflicting stigmata with brass nails through the palms of his hands.
Many years earlier, Jerome and his Protestant wife, Penny, living in a grand house in Malahide, lost an infant through lung failure. When Jerome visits hospital to seek treatment for his bleeding palms, he meets old Rita, whose grand-daughter is dying from cystic fibrosis.
And so it goes, sometimes in language so high-flying that the dialogue becomes unconvincing, sometimes so literal that it becomes obvious and dull and often very coarse.
David Byrne's direction is low-keyed and measured, but it does not ultimately succeed in melding the mix of ideas or the mix of language. Liam Carney offers a distinctly underplayed Jerome, tortured either by his guilt or his imagination. Donna Dent's Penny veers from loving concern for her husband in pain to excoriating anger in face of his revelation of sexual infidelity.
Lisa Harding is the sexually active but emotionally dead Clara. Maire Ni Ghrainne is the very embodiment of old-style Catholicism and Johnny Murphy is the phlegmatic caretaker who has watched the many tenants come and go from the haunted flat.
Monica Frawley's setting tries to reflect the mixture of reality and surreality in the play script, but does not quite pull the elements together seamlessly, no more than the production or the performances can. Fascination with the content of the play is ultimately overcome by unease with its construction.
To book, phone: 01-8787222
