Oleanna

Teachers’ Club, Dublin

Since it first divided opinion in 1992, David Mamet’s inflammatory two-hander has been regarded not so much as the dramatisation of a political power struggle but as a play about sexual harassment. Partly, the original context skewed its interpretation: it opened in the US shortly after sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas, an associate justice of the US supreme court, emerged.

In OIeanna, a war of words escalates between an academic on the verge of tenure, dripping with absent-minded entitlement, and a student initially slow to grasp the nuances of liberal arts spiel but quick to determine insidious meaning behind ambiguous phrases. The question about the play, now facing Company D’s Spartan staging, is whether Mamet’s argument is delicately balanced or unnecessarily blunt.

“That’s my job, don’t you know,” David Scott’s academic, John, says. “To provoke you.” Actually, that’s Mamet’s job, and although he begins here with the knotted tangles of speech – the hermetic surge of rhetoric and the stutter of misapprehension whose photorealistic rhythms so challenge performers – his plotting slips towards vilification. When early audiences even applauded one violent crescendo, can director Ruth Calder-Potts now even the score? Attentive to the power of language, her production concentrates on its delivery. Scott, in jacket and sneakers, is allowed to be self-regarding and casually patronising, while Sinéad O’Riordan, pierced and studded, with her hair dyed cyberpunk plum, looks like she is taking a class in Advanced Stieg Larsson. O’Riordan matches the look with a purposefully obtuse monotone, oddly effective for her character’s literalism. Allied with Mamet’s reactionary nods towards threatening young females and “politically correct” fascism (flush with power when her professor is fighting a rape charge, her “group” demands the banning of his book), she seems easily demonised.

That may be why Calder-Potts hands the stage to Scott, who never leaves it even during costume changes. Although O’Riordan is commendably ambiguous with her final utterance, we are left with the slightly unsettling feeling that for all the play’s insistence that we should question authority, received wisdom and surface appearance, the production lets Mamet off pretty easily.

Runs until Saturday