THERE are a number of unresolved conflicts at the heart of Owen McCafferty's new play Freefalling - commissioned by Kabosh and jointly produced by that, company and Virtual Reality - which makes for a disconcerting evening's theatre. From the onset in its self conscious film noir treatment by director Karl Wallace, with back projected sequences from the likes of Taxi Driver and, Pulp Fiction, one gets the distinct impression that this is a play that wishes ii were a movie. Then there is the set - little boxes made of ticky tacky, shot through with holes big and small, signifying the play that perhaps the thirty something McCafferty should have written, the one about mid life crisis in dubiously cosy suburbia, the one which constantly threatens to surface in some of its most insightful passages.
Instead, McCafferty has been commissioned to write a play aimed at a teenage to mid twenties audiences and has come up with an only slightly toned down stage version of Natural Born Killers, in which two young people from contrasting social backgrounds come together on a park bench, speak out and then act out their individual fantasies, which they push to a horrible, bloody and irrevocable climax.
Anne Bird and Micheal Murphy are fluent and confident in coping with the demands of this shoot from the hip twohander. Bird plays Her, a clever, middle class student, her head full of violent sexual encounters, the femme fatale of pulp fiction. Murphy is Him, a burgerjoint counter hand, who lacks the vocabulary and the education to compete with Her and who ends up following blithely in her dangerous footsteps.
There if an excessive helping of violence and strong language in a play which is not without its moments of incisiveness, but which ultimately goes over the top in far less accomplished a manner than the cult movies which it seeks to emulate.
