IT’ S JUST DANCING IN THE DARK
Enda Walsh’s play is heavy on existential bleakness and light on humour
We’ve been here before with other Enda Walsh plays where he has gnawed away at similar slices of misery: characters locked into a world from which they can’t escape mentally or physically (The New Electric Ballroom); locked up either forcibly or mentally (Walworth Farce); or caught in a room frenetically dancing, jumping and searching for meaning in life (Ballyturk). The ideas are much the same, but the difference between those and Arlington is mostly in the language and the mood. Walworth and Ballyturk are a blaze of language and black comedy. Arlington is bleak, sparingly written, and short on humour.
In one of those featureless rooms where you take a ticket, sit on a plastic chair and wait for your number to be called, a young girl, Isla (Love/Hate’s Charlie Murphy) walks around, keeping herself compulsively busy when she’s not talking to the unseen, incompetent young man (My Left Foot’s Hugh O’Conor) doing surveillance on her in another room. Cameras record her every move. He’s new on the job, and seems far more uneasy than she. They have banal conversation before she eventually explains her situation.
The era is not clear but it seems like a vision of some grim world where people are locked up for any breach of discipline. But if it’s about a totalitarian state or the afflictions of life, it would need a stronger storyline. Unless, of course, the play is actually about the world we inhabit mentally.
The characters are not developed, and seem more like representations of the human condition than human beings. You are not so much watching actual people as experiencing for yourself the feeling of inhabiting a mind in torment as Isla dances and twists, voices are heard, lights flash on and off noisily, walls shake, distorted visions of beauty alternate with disturbing visions of humanity and the music (by Teho Teardo) modulates from the grimly atmospheric to wailing and piercing.
Underlying it all is the desperate need for hope and love to give meaning to life.
Murphy’s dance routines, by themselves tell the story of restless, unbearable captivity. An even more impressive set of callisthenics by Oona Doherty, who I assumed, perhaps wrongly, was also dancing as Isla, had me wondering just how much strain she was inflicting on her body. And though all the dancing is beautifully performed, it extends the story without developing it.
The performances, the choreography, the inventiveness of the lighting and the use of music were a feature of the evening. It was practically a demonstration of Marshall McLuhan’s maxim that the medium is the message.
Admittedly, all is not gloom. The ending throws a couple of unlikely crumbs of comfort at the prevailing misery.
‘A grim world where people are locked up for a minor breaches of discipline’