ALSO PLAYING

I’ve rarely seen two talented performers work as hard as Niamh McGrath and Donncha O’Dea did in Dummy (Peacock, finished yesterday) and fail to deliver the goods. It’s not all their fault: the writer, Peter Dunne, and director Sarah Finlay have to take a lot of the blame.

Teddy and his sister Dolly had a father whose ventriloquist act wrecked the family, past and present. Teddy is a nervous wreck, Dolly wrecks her own TV children’s show. The play is about the legacy of family failure and a split-up that has almost destroyed the children. Ventriloquist acts have always had a chilling Jekyll and Hyde aspect, and the ventriloquist acts here were a clever idea; Teddy and Dolly use their dummies to communicate with each other but in this instance, they take over the show for all the wrong reasons. Instead of the dummies being used to speak the unspeakable truth about the family neuroses, they’re extended into using comedy for its own sake, as a re-hash of the father’s show, and it’s not very funny. The reconstruction consisted of shouting, running around, and unsubtle cock-ups mixed with cringe-making tears and heartbreak. One session went on interminably. It lacked any of the finesse needed to make the knockabout either funny or relevant. Serious comedy should be almost invisible, as it is in the hands of a master like Harold Pinter. There should be a creepy realisation that the comedy here is not so much funny as unbearably poignant, instead of just being unbearable.