Jigsaw review: A play so up close we hear the voice in its character’s head

Jigsaw

Glass Mask Theatre at Bestseller, Dublin

★★★☆☆

Audiences have always been on intimate terms with theatre. In a medium that thrives on its proximity and liveness, even plays staged in small rooms above pubs, and conceived with limited resources, can forge close connections. Just pull up a seat.

Lee Coffey’s breakout play, Leper + Chip, electrified the close-quartered Theatre Upstairs in 2014. In recent years the playwright‘s projects have been staged in larger venues and become more kaleidoscopic and sweeping in scale.

With Jigsaw, his new play for Glass Mask Theatre, Coffey is going back to the small room in the bar.

When Jim, a Dubliner homeless and sober for many years, busily pragmatic and unrestrainedly honest in Alan Devine’s performance, is seen leaving his hostel, he gives an instruction that sounds intriguingly commanding; it could be punctuated with a colon. “I walk. Dublin: talk,” he says, outlining the conceit of many a Dublin odyssey as the play roves past familiar urban scenes. (“On the left is the Spire, a f**king waste of money.”)

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He encounters several people from his life before living on the streets, including a schoolmate turned gym overlord and an estranged daughter (all depicted by Craig Connolly), who help recount an incident in which Jim, out of control on cocaine, was accused of assaulting his wife.

Connolly isn’t here just to portray the play’s external characters. During a tense reunion with his spouse, Jim begins hearing things – “this voice peeping up”. Connolly starts addressing him like a kind of shoulder devil, as if Coffey were giving addiction an internal voice, stirred by triggers and rationalising relapse: “I head to town!” (“That‘s the spirit!”)

It‘s not the first time Jim has heard voices. When the play’s second half goes back 20 years, swapping in Connolly as a younger version of the man, with Devine now providing the back-up as surrounding characters, we see him take cocaine for the first time, at his wife’s New Year’s Eve party. “This is the sound of getting f**ked up,” he says, grimly literal. (“We’re going to be friends, you and I,” Devine says with a grin.)

As the play moves towards an uneasily reconcilable conclusion, asking questions of a society quick to judge, it‘s possible that this could be delivered with the breakneck pace of Leper + Chip. Ian Toner‘s production often feels stranded somewhere less certain. (It was the late Karl Shiels, an actor intimate with the plays of Mark O’Rowe, who first recognised that playwright‘s snappy crosscuts and exhilarating speed in Coffey’s work, and chose to direct Leper + Chip.)

O’Rowe’s early work has its own DNA, its punching henchmen and horny seducers indebted to the contrived machismo of David Mamet‘s theatre. Coffey is insistently less cartoonish, as if trying to land a whirling Dublin tale, fuelled by thrills and suspense, somewhere as recognisably real as the modern despair of addiction and homelessness. With all the puzzle pieces, that could be a finished picture worth seeing.

Jigsaw is at Glass Mask Theatre at Bestseller, Dublin, until Saturday, May 24th