A Dream Play

Peacock Theatre, Dublin

"WAIT," SAYS a character in the dream-themed summer blockbuster, Inception. "Whose subconscious are we going into, exactly?"

It’s a question you could as easily ask of August Strindberg’s expressionistic work of 1902, or Caryl Churchill’s 2005 version, or indeed of National Youth Theatre’s playfully skittering new production directed by Jimmy Fay.

It is the dreamer’s consciousness that rules the splitting and multiplying characters on the stage. But despite the collaborations and elaborations of every production, the dreamer-in-chief is still Strindberg who didn’t so much write the play as unleash it. Churchill’s version is slimmer and more lucid, with licks of irony that temper the original’s deep melancholy. The NYT ensemble follows that delicate balance, serving both as the dream’s interpreters and its conspirators.

An early and amusingly surreal addition, for instance, sees a white rabbit taking to the stage – from a gallery of rabbits – to begin the show. It's a well-worn reference, from Alice in Wonderlandto The Shiningto Donnie Darko, and it begs the question can we portray the unconscious without becoming self-conscious? Fay's production wisely makes a virtue of it – this is a play as much as a dream – and so the stage is invoked as a space pullulating with possibility.

Ferdia Murphy’s economical design under Eamon Fox’s shifting constellation of lightbulbs extends the idea with a stage within the stage, a red curtain that trails into the auditorium with the surreal bend of a Dali clock, and a symbolic stage door into another world behind which lies either endless promise or absolutely nothing.

As Agnes – here split into two characters – moves through a stream of vignettes exploring human misery and responsibility, we hear contemporary echoes behind the drip-drop of tears. “I’m sick of life,” says a betrayed mother. “Life’s really difficult,” notes an unhappily married woman. And rather than decide that mankind is to be pitied, Agnes finally observes, “People are so fucked up.”

Fay resists the temptation to treat such sentiments as adolescent miserabilism, his 16 young performers leavening it instead with stabs of humour, artful stage devices and an occasional Joy Division freak out.

The production is nowhere stronger, though, than when the entire company is present, gliding together in Liz Roche’s darkly entrancing choreography or performing exquisitely arranged versions of Jacques Brel and The Smiths under Philip Stewart’s musical direction.

Heavier visual references, such as a series of Munch paintings, sometimes lumber the supple logic of the unconscious. But as the stage fills with anxiety, music and allusion – a school classroom drowning in paper airplanes is particularly good – the possibilities of the stage are always in encouraging flux. It’s a testament to the success of the NYT that the theatre remains a place to learn, to play, perchance to dream. Until August 28