The New Electric Ballroom: Enda Walsh’s play gets a brilliant staging at the Gate Theatre

THE NEW ELECTRIC BALLROOM

Gate Theatre, Dublin

★★★★☆

“People are talkers” are the opening words of Enda Walsh’s garrulous The New Electric Ballroom, where words are used to shelter its characters from the endless disappointment of reality. Breda (Barbara Brennan) and Clara (Jane Brennan) are sisters in their 60s who spend their days re-enacting scenes from their past, all from a night they spent 40 years ago at the eponymous ballroom, where they caught the roving eye of its main attraction, the showman the Roller Royle.

If the prompt bowl, filled with folded bits of paper, suggests a sense of randomness to their storytelling game, it is merely one of the many McGuffins Walsh weaves into the surreal world of his play. Putting the elderly sisters through their paces every day is their younger sister, Ada (Orla Fitzgerald), who stage-manages the compulsive re-enactments with a steely, exacting eye.

Despite the intense, dense poetry of Walsh’s script, the sense in The New Electric Ballroom comes less from what is being said than from the way the words are uttered, and why. If words are a wall to keep bad memories out, so they offer a critical sense of humanity to the characters. As Breda says, “Even besides the talking, far deeper than the talking is the need to connect.”

Kat Heath evokes a whole world in their one-room set, a salt- and sea-mottled corrugated-tin construction that calls to mind the town cannery. Multicoloured buoys hang from a fishing-net ceiling, later becoming improvised disco balls that Ciarán Bagnall, the lighting designer, takes full advantage of. A fridge against the back wall is both a brilliant sight gag and a magic portal from which the women’s old dresses appear, as if literally frozen in time.

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Emma Jordan’s great achievement as the production’s director is to create an atmosphere of potent isolation. The room never feels more alive with tension than at the moment when Patsy (Marty Rea), a fisherman, makes his ritual arrival. As the double doors open dramatically and his box of fish hits the floor, the atmosphere shifts and hisses, like air being released from a can. (Katie Richardson, the sound designer, makes a real difference here.)

But all of Walsh’s words must be spoken and his bizarre routines enacted, and here the playwright is more than well served by the ensemble. As Clara, Jane Brennan brings a childish petulance and skittishness to her sexagenarian; Barbara Brennan’s more brittle Breda sulks and squalls, but not without our sympathy. Rea ably steps into the shoes of the Roller Royle, and his sung scene, with Fitzgerald looking desperately into his eyes, is a highlight of this brilliant production of Walsh’s barmy play.

Continues at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, April 1st, then runs at the Everyman, Cork, from Tuesday, April 4th, to Friday, April 7th