Love and Money

Nuns Island Theatre, Galway

In recent years, Galway Youth Theatre has done its level best to terrify us at close range. In 2007, an audience of three sat in the back of a parked car while front-seat performers unravelled the horror of Neil LaBute's Autobahn. Since then we've spent time with LaBute's equally provocative Some Girl(s)in a hotel room, the same site for Fiona Evans' disquieting Scarborough,switching to an apartment for Polly Stenham's unnerving Tusk Tusklast year. Logically, their next step should have been to perform Sarah Kane's Blasted to an audience of one in a coffin.

Instead, director Niall Cleary has chosen Dennis Kelly's scabrous satire Love and Money, a play involving suicide, grave desecration, murder and, most horrifying of all, bad debts. "I felt power over money," confesses one character, which would be a more admirable sentiment in these days of financial crisis if it didn't accompany a shocking act of vandalism.

Throughout, though, Kelly’s polemic issues a stark warning about what happens when people are reduced to figures, just as his narrative is fractured through a string of seemingly discrete episodes. Conor Geoghegan and Kate McCarthy are endearing through an initially awkward email exchange which cedes to a shocking revelation. An elderly couple (Rod Goodall and Mary Monaghan-McHugh) follow with a direct address to the audience, who sit around the space as though it were an arena, before Geoghegan reappears for a job interview in which nothing speaks of vapid corporate smugness better than Richard Seery’s pointed smirk.

Kelly’s conceit is to create a picture which slots into place like a puzzle: an elliptical approach to the conspicuous consumption and easy credit which got his central couple – not to mention our nation – into such dire straits.

Making allusions to Ravenhill, Pinter, Bond and Churchill, Kelly’s writing is a deliberately jagged construction, but here Robbie Carroll adds Morrisey to the mix, covering scene transitions with the The Smiths’ back catalogue: a sensitive delivery which pushes the pathos button harder than necessary.

With Shaunna McEvilly’s fetching shopaholic caught on a plinth between handbags and stillettos, though, GYT make a sharper point about the transformation of people into things, a truly recognisable horror, up close and personal.

– Runs until July 23