Running on empty

Speedtrap: Confessions of a Speed Junkie

Smock Alley Theatre

**

Yvonne O’Reilly is consumed with nostalgia for the rosy fragments of her childhood: winning the gold medal for the under-9s 100 metre sprint, then winning the under-12s, and then the under-14s. Just when a pattern seems to be emerging, however, she tells us with acutely careful deliberation, and for annoyingly unexplained reasons, that her notoriety as a local legend nicknamed “little sprinter” caused tension within her already dysfunctional family and she gave it up. Cue the source material for an hour-long play? I’m not so sure, and neither, it seems, is she.

Two lines of toilet paper efficiently delineate the parameters of a running track across the bare black stage from where Yvonne cautiously imparts her story about her love of speed, of constantly running away, and the lessons she’s learned as a result. She does this while exercising some age-old tricks: large video projections underscored by meditative music, long silences and objects extracted from her pockets that hold faintly metaphorical associations to what is being said.

Until Sept 21