Billy the Boat Loves Angelina

The New Theatre, Dublin

For the curious souls who fall prey to dark influence and illicit highs, it’s easy to get mixed up in a worrying subculture: that of the monologue play.

Take Sandra, an unemployed single mother alone in a grotty high-rise flat, who seems strung out on first-person narration from the moment we meet her. Whatever compels her to speak, a blissful relief at first, has become an unbreakable addiction – not as damaging as the heroin she’s on, perhaps, but certainly as isolating.

The first section of Isobel Mahon’s short, two-part play for Eska Riada, revived from late last year, does match its form with its concern: a portrait of disconnection. But it feels more like a writing exercise or a character sketch, in which a woman in a toxic relationship protests against the direness of her situation within a series of rules for better living, all of which sound the same: “Don’t expect miracles”; “Compromise”; “Be flexible”.

Gina Costigan gives an assured performance under Caroline FitzGerald’s sparing direction, and Mahon is good with character detail and speech, but the writer, the audience and even the performer seem smugly superior to Sandra. Even in her own words, she never seems more than a projection; a figure to be judged, pitied and cast away.

Part two, a three-hander set 18 months previously, may well have been better left to stand alone.

Here we find Sandra before the fall, with her two siblings, the gauche pigeon fancier Tim (a well-judged Kevin Shackleton) and party girl Susan (Rachel Mae Brady) and although they all have brief exchanges, their separate narratives again split into a monologue play, just as Susan is lured, with dread inevitability, into a Stygian underworld of petty crime and heroin addiction.

One curious consequence is that the female characters in this diptych are punished relentlessly (Tim has a rather endearingly performed and uncomplicated coming-out story) while drug culture is treated only in moralising or prurient terms: “You want to know what it’s like, don’t you?” says Susan, as though

Trainspotting

had never happened.

Tellingly, the play is more comfortable with discreet classical references than social realism when Sandra and Tim pursue Susan into a Dublin underworld, encountering blind seers and mythic boatmen along the way.

Still monologuing, even when united in the same scene, the three performers neatly construct the Hades of a drugs den while each portraying one menacing figure, Rayo, with admirable bite.

Ending with cautious hope, tempered by the information of the previous play (

Don’t Expect Miracles

), it delivers the characters from the narcotic haze of their monologues, knowing just how hard it is to kick the habit.