A soul-scorching epic scattered with incest, sodomy and rape, screaming blue murder and boggle-eyed dysfunction, the latest production from Corcadorca will not make for an evening of cosy, cuddlesome theatre.
Still, next week's staging of Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane, the controversy magnet supreme of the new Brit-drama, is threatening to be one of the theatrical events of the year, with the Cork company greasing up a cast of more than 50 to wrestle with one of the darkest texts to emerge this decade.
Updated from Seneca's classic (them Romans!), it tells of a contemporary prince who spends his days dribbling and slobbering among the detritus of junk culture. Played with a nasty insouciance by Myles Horgan, he's not an attractive proposition but still manages to incite the nocturnal desires of his mad stepmother. His rejection of her sparks the play's central dynamic and it unfolds lurchingly on a spectacular series of ramps and platforms that dip and slide around a bad dream mind-scape that's been conjured up amid the mock-Italiantate splendour of the former Atkin's Garden Centre on Camden Quay.
The audience will follow the play, dodging vamps on ramps, snaking into a dusty subterranean cell and emerging finally onto Pine Street (with the blessing of culture-loving Cork Corporation, bless 'em) for a final scene so roaringly excessive even Mr De Mille might have baulked at its staging.
This is not the first time Corcadorca has used the promenade style, having utilised it to some effect with A Clockwork Orange a couple of years back. Director Pat Kiernan is enjoying opening out the script, having spent the last while at the reins of the more claustrophobic Disco Pigs. He believes Phaedra's Love to be a startlingly resonant work for the late 1990s. "The issue of the play is whether it's better to live and experience or to be completely isolated," he says. "And society is a place of less and less meaningful contact." Having conquered the civilised world with Disco Pigs (Observer play of the year, bubbling acclaim at Edinburgh etc), Corcadorca is staying at home with the new production.
"It has been nice to go abroad and do well for the company," says Kiernan, "but our commitment is to Cork first and foremost and that's how it will remain."
Phaedra's Love will have 16 performances from Monday night at Atkin's Garden Centre, Camden Quay, Cork, at 8.30 p.m.