The Cave review: Tommy Tiernan is perfectly cast as a downtrodden barroom philosopher in Kevin Barry’s bleakly funny play

The Cave

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

★★★★☆

You are not going to get away with calling your play The Cave – particularly if your characters are actually confined in such a space – without audiences wondering about Plato’s most famous allegory.

The Greek wondered what we would know of the world if all we saw were shadows flickering on the wall of a rocky cavity. Archie and Bopper, depressed Irish siblings, have more than that. They have a smartphone. The former climbs a ladder and waves the device at the heavens in often-futile search for “coverage”.

Their particular interest is a celebrity named Elvira and her frustrating association with “the Irish actor Con Costello” (a man they despise). Do they really learn any more about Elvira than they would if they saw only her shadow? The lying PR wonks who haunt Instagram were, after all, nowhere in Plato’s story. Right?

Kevin Barry’s bleakly funny new play for the Abbey is not about the internet. But no piece so concerned with our habitual flight from reality can ignore that engulfing phenomenon. The singular writer, as busy a dramatist as he is a novelist, came up with idea while pacing the Caves of Keash, near his home in Co Sligo. Joanna Parker’s set design gives us a huge grey outcrop – like a giant crumpled tissue – fronted by a shallow opening from which emerge stolen tools, wheelchairs and drinks trolleys.

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The Cave: Aaron Monaghan and Judith Roddy. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh

The Cave: Aaron Monaghan and Tommy Tiernan. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh

Archie, as played by Tommy Tiernan, is curious and vulnerable but not yet lost to despair. Bopper, given hunched reality by Aaron Monaghan, is a more troubled fellow. He yearns for a perfect moment in 1995. He fixates on the loss of his testicle. Archie worries he may do something silly.

There is no escaping comparisons with the first act of Waiting for Godot. Like Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, the two men worry over matters of existential importance, but we get more sense here of the characters’ place in wider society.

After a few early confrontations, we learn that Helen (Judith Roddy), the poor garda tasked with warning them about antisocial behaviour, is their long-suffering sister. Halfway through it seems as if the apparently inseparable pair may actually get to live apart for a spell. One can scarcely imagine that of Beckett’s duo.

Directed with discipline and clarity by Caitríona McLaughlin, the three actors slip comfortably into well-fitting skins. Tiernan could hardly be better suited for a downtrodden barroom philosopher. Monaghan keeps the rage at an impressive simmer throughout. Roddy gives early hints that Helen may not be quite so reliably “sensible” as she at first seems.

Presented, a little like a Wes Anderson film, in 13 chapters – each titled in voiceover and overhead projection – The Cave is a little short on overarching structure, but it compensates with a nagging commitment to themes of psychological evasion. Too many of us, like Archie and Bopper, are perched at a metaphorical distance from the rest of society, finding ways to distracts ourselves from pain, responsibility and the inevitability of death. Maybe The Cave is a play about the internet.

The Cave is at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until Friday, July 18th