Strandline

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

The strandline marks the furthest advance of the sea, where marine life is washed up, lost bodies legendarily resurface and once-hidden secrets are unceremoniously disclosed. In Abbie Spallen’s potent and densely layered new play for Fishamble, the sea of an unnamed Northern Irish coastal town also erodes any strict boundaries.

Her contemporary setting reverberates with mythological echoes, her story set-up parcels out salient political points, and as the figure of an artist and a distrusting community crash together, comedy and disquiet blur into one.

With her character introductions, Spallen offers a refreshing tsunami of panic and prefigurement. While a wedding party is in full swell, a nearby boat is in jeopardy and Cathy Belton’s Maírín watches the struggling speck of her husband disappear. Also scouring the horizon is déclassé ditz Eileen (Fiona Bell), a loquacious mystic boy named Sweeney (Conor MacNeill), the town overseer Clodagh (Eleanor Methven) and Maírín’s stepdaughter Tríona (Samantha Heaney) – just married and within a hair’s breadth of becoming an emergency-measure human sacrifice.

Spallen establishes a world at once recognisable and surreally distended. When the characters regroup for a Celtic wake in Maírín’s home, the space inspires a compelling vertigo.

Modelled on a Le Corbusier design, it towers with prosperity and exquisite taste, but just as Maírín inserts pregnant symbols into her artisan weavings, so designer Sabine Dargent trims the space with the tools of creation and warning omens: a dominant loom, tins of vermilion dye, tangled wool that drips from above like storm-thrown seaweed.

The set precipitates a play about community and conspiracy in which Maírín, the artist outsider, gradually plumbs the hidden depths of her town – and her husband’s shadowy role in it – while her unwilling female visitors resemble something between a coven and a criminal cabal.

This community is insular and suspicious. It is adapting to a failing economy – “when the tide goes out you see who’s been swimming in the buff” – and is becoming more fractious and guarded. “Just people trying to get by, desperate,” says Methven’s increasingly dominant Clodagh. “Nothin’ here would drag a body in.”

Spallen weaves so many strands into the fabric of the play – property, economy, mythology, environment, banditry, artistry – that it's a challenge to tie them together, to resolve a play thick with detail in a twist of heavy menace: part State of the Nation, part Wicker Man.

Such density does allow for tremendous performances in which Belton, an actor of poise and quiet power, can appear alternately frazzled and commanding, circling the indomitable and wily Methven in discreet combat.

Director Jim Culleton can even afford to leave the typically excellent Fiona Bell asleep on a couch for whole stretches of the play, mercilessly costumed and loudly snoring, both a visual and aural gag.

Between a fastidious plot and a wide scope of allusions, it may be hard to take in everything during one sitting. Yet that owes something to the high tide of Spallen’s ideas: awash with style and verve, wit and intellect, provoking further thoughts when those waves roll out. Until Dec 5