ALSO PLAYING

After the first production of Ballyturk (Abbey until, Mar 11.

HHH) I wrote that it reminded me of Henry Thoreau’s dictum about the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. I was wrong about the word quiet. What’s on show is frenzied desperation – two characters locked into Enda Walsh’s predictable room, chaotically filling their time and minds by running, jumping, skipping, and using a blitz of wordplay in exhausting physical comic routines that the Monty Python team might have written. Their only link with the outside world is voices heard through the wall. Clocks are a menace that remind them of time and the dreaded word liberty. Ballyturk appears to exist only in the safety of their minds. As an allegory of life, it might work well if it was developed along those lines, but in the midst of the chaos a wall descends admitting a woman (Olwen Fouéré). And you’re left wondering what she represents. Is she the embodiment of life, of mankind, of truth: some kind of creator: the gateway to freedom? What she implies is that touching reality is dangerous but necessary. She asks if they’ve given each other names, (they’re just named 1 & 2, she’s 3) and she gives a long dissertation on the diversity and meaning of life that includes the words of the Cahn/Styne song Time After Time. But spelling out messages in specific words undermines the allegorical nature of the play and leaves you in an unsatisfying half-way house. The performances of Mikel Murfi and Tadhg Murphy in frantic, physical mode were superb. Murfi in particular has an astonishing ability to create characters with the slightest of gestures. Murphy almost matched him for physicality, but he was not so convincing in his quieter speeches that echo those of Fouéré. The audience gave rapturous applause at the end, but I can’t help feeling it was for the performances, not the content.