Guidelines for a Long and Happy Life

Old Victor Stationery Warehouse, Belfast Festival

Desperate times call for desperate measures. For reasons soon to be revealed, the trio of characters populating the opening scene of Paul Kennedy’s bleak new play have taken desperation to unplumbed depths of inhumanity. Eleven years ago, Tinderbox stormed the Belfast Festival with its site-specific performance piece

Convictions

. Then the venue was the Crumlin Road Courthouse; now it is a disused warehouse on the city limits.

Stepping into its dank, cavernous gloom, one is seized by a sense of apprehension and foreboding. The transformed space looks and sounds amazing, thanks to the co-ordination of Niall Rea’s stunning design concept, Ciaran Bagnall’s hazy lighting, Justin Yang’s tense soundscape and Susan Scott’s fashionably tattered costumes.

In Michael Duke’s promenade production, the audience is guided by torchlight to a row of wooden benches beside a ramshackle hut. Attention is directed towards a long, narrow passageway, lit by a single piercing light, along which a great-coated male figure Ack (John Shayegh) and a half-witted creature Bin (Stevie Prickett), crawling on all-fours, slowly advance.

Their gaunt, filthy profiles and hesitant spoken exchanges hint of unimaginably terrible past experiences. When a wild-looking woman emerges from the hut, carrying a gun, it is impossible to anticipate the horrific incident soon to occur.

This ambitious, devilishly structured piece, set in an ash-coloured, post-apocalyptic world, carries distinct echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s

The Road

. Characters come and go in varying stages of physical and psychological devastation, rutting and raping and killing and cannibalising, all in the name of survival.

The action spools backwards to James Doran’s Man, striding purposefully across the parched landscape, pausing only to bring a flash of poetic rationale to his distasteful encounter with Katie Richardson’s bizarrely attractive Woman.

In a stilted, overly expositional closing scene, Andrew Stanford and Faolan Morgan are two early survivors, producing an ironic radio update on ways of creating a long and happy life in this hellhole. In a final glimpse of our own carefree world, through a restaurant window, Kennedy produces a shock of realisation that what has been witnessed in reverse is a vision of the future, a future – our future?

Runs until October 28th