Chicane

Draíocht, Blanchardstown

It is late evening in Dublin and Robert Cooper – an overworked, middle-aged, mid-level solicitor with a terrible secret – makes small talk with his office cleaner, Ray, an earthy, jovial sort whose life, we quickly learn, has been shaken by a terrible, unsolved tragedy. But wait! Ray is not as artless as he first appears. Within a few minutes he has extracted a gun, a Stanley knife and a confession from Robert to the hit-and-run accident that killed his little girl.

But wait! Ray isn't finished with him yet and has arranged for Robert's wife to stumble deluded into the hostage scene. But wait! The woman who arrives is not Robert's wife at all but his young mistress, Julia, derailing Ray's best-laid plans. But wait! Julia has designs of her own, using the situation to force Robert into divorcing his dying wife. But wait! Is anything here as it seems? Anthony Brophy's first play, staged by Gúna Nua, is not only determined to pull the rug out from under us, but also the floorboards, the underlay and finally the foundations. What is initially a dizzy pleasure soon becomes a tumbling problem – the difference between The Usual Suspects, say, and Lost.

“To you, truth doesn’t exist, it’s a concept,” Ray tells Robert. “But to me it’s a diamond.” To the play, though, it’s a game: a series of switcheroos, followed by explication, which sacrifice consistency, characterisation and tension for zingy one-liners and theatre in-jokes.

Over the course of the night, Robert’s destruction will be just about complete, but why should we feel any sympathy for a self-interested, confessed weasel other than because he is played by the likeable Barry Barnes? Jane McGrath does what she can with the hotheaded and emotionally unstable Julia, but the part is troublingly depthless. And the most interesting thing about Emmet Kirwan’s ceaselessly wisecracking Ray is the void at his centre, one that never makes it clear whether he’s a clown or a psychopath, but also amplifies the hollowness of the play.

Brophy, an actor making his writing debut, enjoys feeding Ray gags as much as he enjoys delivering plot twists, but after a while even his funniest quips and narrative machinations become distractingly artificial; technical exercises that carry no emotional consequence and lessen our involvement. Only one early moment, when Kirwan breaks down in gratitude and agony at hearing Robert’s confession, bears some human truth. Without it, director Paul Meade busies himself in the metronomic beats of revelation and reversal, then simply ballistic effects, and the production feels as confined as its handcuffed hostages.

With more twists than a corkscrew, one last surprise might strain an audience’s patience, but it recasts the entire show as an intriguingly sour metaphor for the lot of the performer playing a part. It’s a final twist in the tale, but also the sharpest sting.

Until September 11, then touring: Everyman Palace, Cork (Sep 13-18), Civic Theatre, Dublin (Sep 21-25), Belltable, Limerick (Sep 27-Oct 2) and Mill Theatre, Dundrum (Oct 4-9) 25