The Tide lacks real ebb and flow

The Tide The New Theatre, until March 2 ★★☆☆☆

Here’s a play that needed some ruthless input from its dramaturg (an ugly word for what used to be called simply a script editor). Short plays with small casts in particular need to sharpen the script to home in on the essentials.

Tara Maria Lovett takes on a lot in her 80-minute two-hander. There’s murder, a couple of fantasists, one a young man with a burdensome stepmother, the other a middle-aged woman, Ivy, in an unhappy marriage to an impotent potentially dangerous husband. To add to her other problems, Ivy has an obsession with Manannán Mac Lir, god of the sea. And there’s a garda, so ridiculous that he might have walked in to the wrong play. Another theme is the use of the ebb and flow of the tide as a metaphor for the path of our lives; and it’s all tied up in the style of some incongruous screwball comedy.

The murder plot involves a swap; young JC (Killian Filan) will kill Ivy’s husband, while she will reluctantly dispose of his stepmother who is in a wheelchair. Alfred Hitchcock handled the same thing very stylishly in Strangers On A Train. Murder mixed with comedy has a long history, but it’s a subject that needs a lot of development by itself.

The play starts with JC and Ivy, strangers to each other, contemplating the tides and flotsam on a beach and discussing the difference between the young and the old, before getting to a discussion of murder. The scene is beefed up by some film projection of a swimmer, and penitents at Lough Derg. There’s even a snatch of Marty Morrissey doing a bit of commentary, and a minor role for a dead goldfish. The main problem is the lack of direction in what it’s all about. The young man JC is given an overload of breezy dialogue that often drowns the serious themes without throwing any light on them. Killian Filan, doubling up with a couple of caps, copes with his various roles extremely well, but the lack of consistency in the script doesn’t help. Ann Russell as Ivy does her best to anchor the serious themes but the dialogue never really gets under the skin of the two leads.

‘Alfred Hitchcock handled the same thing very stylishly in Strangers On A Train’