Mespil in the Dark Live: Pan Pan get meta with this play about theatre

Mespil in the Dark Live

Samuel Beckett Theatre

3 Stars

When theatres closed down during the pandemic, Pan Pan Theatre turned to making films. Knowing they could not replicate the theatrical experience online, they made a series of short features about fictional actors’ lives in an apartment complex in Dublin city. The films were absorbing in their intimacy: a high-concept arthouse serial soap opera, in which the gently overlapping storylines of the characters offered a satisfying narrative arc, as well as a study in bohemia.

With Mespil in the Dark Live, the company has reimagined the project for the stage. The setting is, notionally, the same Dublin 4 apartment complex, though the company are content with offering a bare bones idea of it (a shabby director’s chair upholstered in black plastic sheeting, a table with kettle, water and tea). The real setting, however, is the rehearsal room, where the actors and their offstage collaborators (which include Pan Pan’s artistic directors Aedín Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn, and writer Eugene O’Brien) have come together to stage a play about actors. Bill (Robert O’Mahoney) is keen to take charge. He doesn’t believe in warm-ups but invites the other performers (Andrew Bennett, Pauline Hutton and Ahmed Karim Tamu) to share their experiences of previous productions instead - egotistical actors and tyrannical directors abound. The metatheatrical layers are deliberately thick. What’s the play about? Theatre, darling!

While Pan Pan’s films offered audiences a cinema verite close-up of creative life, the stage version exploits every theatrical trick in the book in an attempt to do the same. There is dry ice, brilliant lighting effects, a monologue competition, audience participation, a male actor in low heels and a ridiculous floral skirt suit, an opening rap number, a closing dance sequence (performed by Mollyanna Ennis and Alex Vostokova). There is even a pantomime horse. It is all terrific fun, though the effect is distancing rather than absorbing.

If the guiding logic for Mespil in the Dark Live is the question ‘what can the theatre do that film cannot?’, the demonstration is clear. Whether this is enough to capture the imagination of an audience not already invested in the idea of live performance, however, is a different question, and one whose answer may not favour this audacious experiment.