At Swim Two Birds

The Factory, Sligo

"It was stated that while the novel and the play were both pleasing intellectual exercises, the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion," the aspirant writer/ narrator of At Swim Two Birdsdeclaims. After similar attempts by Aubrey Welsh and Alex Johnston, Jocelyn Clarke is the latest playwright to use Flann O'Brien's playful parody of form as a starting point for adapting O'Brien's modernist meta-fictional book.

But At Swim Two Birdsis a fundamentally literary text. It is a book about the writing of a book, a novel concerned with making the form new, and the natural intervention should be a textual one. Thus, despite the clever visual tricks of Niall Henry's production and the impressive feat of condensing the sprawling story to an almost digestible 90 minutes, Clarke's dense adaptation fails to convince us that such theatricalisation is necessary.

Clarke structures the play as a series of biographical reminiscences, extracts from the book and occasional TV interviews, introducing the audience to the essentially literary characters of O’Brien’s wild imagination. On the first level of reality/illusion, these include the aspirant student/ writer and his suspicious uncle; on the second level, the fictional Western romance writer Dermot Trellis, the writer character in the student’s book; and on the third level, the series of characters who turn on their creator (Trellis) and refuse to allow him to consummate the storylines that he consciously craves.

Lit by Michael Cummins’s atmospheric footlights, Jamie Vartan’s deep stage more convincingly frames the meta-fictional devices of O’Brien’s book as a play within a play. The proscenium arch and the thick velvet curtains suggest an early 20th-century variety show, while the visible costumes and microphones lining the stage draw attention to the postmodern performance strategies that the actors inhabit in line with Clarke’s fragmentation of notions of identity and performance.

Sandra O'Malley's narrator anchors Blue Raincoat's small ensemble (although even the narrator's voice is not a stable one, spread as it is between all the actors at one point or another), while John Carty, Kellie Hughes, Ciarán McCauley and Fiona McGeown use fast-paced physical and vocal transformations to move from one part to the next with impressive skill and energy. But even their committed self-consciousness is not enough to bring greater purpose or clarity to the complex convolutions of At Swim Two Birds. For that you will have to go back to the book. Until Nov 14 SARA KEATING