Intimacies and Elephants

Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork

In this play three men of uncertain age meet on stage and shake hands as if at a funeral. They are gathered merely because they each have a story to tell, and over more than 90 uninterrupted minutes, they deliver their tales of love and woe, intersecting without ever integrating. Producer, director and adapter Pat Talbot offers these three episodes from the American writer Raymond Carver as baldly, and a bravely, as this, and for a while it looks as if this approach, lifting the stories from the page without theatrical fashioning, simply cannot work. It's difficult to define why it becomes so satisfying, why the stories gather impetus, why we want to know what happens, if we ever can know.

The thing is that with Carver one is not going to be told and in being faithful to the rueful acknowledgment so characteristic of these short stories (from Elephant and Other Storiesand What We Talk About When We Talk About Love), Talbot matches the honesty of the writing with an honesty of presentation. He takes a risk, and that is part of the slow-growing excitement, or involvement, of the production. The men sit under a wide American sky, designer Olan Wrynn's bright blue scored with brilliant cloud while urgent trans-American trains plunge past. Although Conor Dwane as the elephant burdened by his family's fecklessness is over-pitched, the character burns through in a fine voice which needs only to be tempered to allow acceptance filter convincingly into his desperation. Edelle Notte, Tadgh Hickey, George Hanover and Myles Horgan fit neatly into the Carver mould, Horgan with the least to say and saying it as if responding to the advice to "tell it like you have to and forget the rest".

Runs until Saturday