No Romance

Peacock Theatre, Dublin

MIDWAY THROUGH the fretful making of an erotic photo collection for her boyfriend, while she is dressed in a fuchsia-coloured medieval-style dress that aims for “sexy Guinevere” but comes off as “Bunratty psychedelia”, Janet Moran’s effervescent Laura wonders if this is all a bit desperate. Her photographer, Gail, is sceptical: “I think the wand is confusing.”

But the great comedy, keen sympathy and lingering poignancy of Nancy Harris’s Abbey debut will wisely avoid simple answers. Laura, like everyone else in these three teasingly connected short plays, has been weaned on a diet of fantasy. Harris’s astute triptych shows what happens when reality intrudes.

Surprisingly fluent in Arthurian romance, Celtic mythology and tasteful internet smut, Laura could be a ditzy scholar of erotica. Describing one blog, The Story of C, as a series of sexual tales involving ordinary people or mythic figures – each told with a twist – she may as well be talking about Harris’s play. That isn’t to suggest that Wayne Jordan’s production has a one-track mind.

Laura spills a secret that deepens her anxious naughtiness into thornier matters of body politics, sex and death, while Natalie Radmall-Quirke, stately and dispassionate as Gail, will discover herself on the emotionally rough end of a “courtly love” triangle. Here, you’re either searching for a love story or condemned to live through one.

Harris’s writing is bracingly witty, alert and incisive, although its articulacy and bothersome scene changes suggest it would lose little as a radio drama. An expertly judged performance by Stephen Brennan in the second play strikes a more physically dependent balance between farce and psychodrama. A victim of the “too much information age”, Brennan’s Joe is less concerned with the death of his mother than the Facebook frolics of his daughter, but he becomes a mortifyingly funny dissembler when his own internet activities come back to haunt him.

Confronted by wife Carmel (Tina Kelleher), their exchanges carry grace notes of Arthur Schnitzler, raising chuckles as they induce shivers: can fantasy and life be reconciled, or should some secrets stay buried?

The last play, like Paul Keogan’s sparing set, is burdened by demands of structure and resolution. Keogan’s solution is to steadily peel his design away, from a canny Roy Lichtenstein embellishment in the studio to the merest suggestion of a West Cork home strewn with packing boxes. But Harris must thread earlier connections into the story of the elderly eccentric, Peg (an engaging Stella McCusker), whose tortured romantic history and depth of feeling makes her harried, exacting son (Conor Mullen) and disconnected grandson (Dáire Cassidy) seem both tragically hollow by comparison and too lightly drawn.

When giving counsel on the importance of desire and passion, Peg’s exhortation to the unquenchable fantasies of myth supply the play’s animation and finally its logic. “Just because you have a tragic life, doesn’t mean you have to have a tragic story,” she says. “We make our own stories.”

The secret of Harris’s play, vividly and touchingly realised, is that the reverse is also true. Whatever the title says, and however it goads or guides us, romance isn’t dead.

Until April 2