The Uncertainty Files

Bewley’s Café Theatre, Dublin

Linda McLean’s new play for Glasgow’s Òrán Mor and London’s new writing powerhouse, Paines Plough, is a verbatim drama about uncertainty. Or at least, I think it is. Presented as part of Bewley’s International Season, the play began as a series of interviews with upstate New Yorkers, largely in their 20s and 30s, all responding to the broad topic of uncertainty through the frame of personal reference. The results are less about a subject than expressing variations on a condition: the doubts attached to love, family, identity and spirit.

Those interviews, faithfully transcribed with every hesitation, repetition and fumbled syntax in McLean’s verbatim text, are here performed by three performers using Scottish accents. That shift in voice doesn’t particularly distract, but when a young Scottish woman describes the oasis of calm provided by the “drugstore”, the reference inspires a brief psychological double take, as though we had stumbled on the sidewalk in the crisp air of Fall.

Director Charlotte Gwinner’s production clearly finds ambiguity infectious, leaving the monologues elliptical and each speaker bluntly introduced: “MI. Female. 24.” “AM. Male. 33”. Steven Duffy, Lesley Hart and Helen Mallon, dressed in neutral blue T-shirts and each sitting behind a table with a prop microphone and coffee mug, work hard to differentiate their speakers physically and vocally. But while “MI Female 24” or “K Female 24” make return appearances, the show fights consistency: characters are traded between performers, and soon there are too many voices to keep track of.

At one point, Gwinner even has her actors stand up and swap positions for fear the voices become too easy to locate.

Instead, it feels that speakers are simply discarded, lost in the crowd and the din of dubious relationships, parental anxieties or spiritual wonderings. Anything more intriguingly specific – such as a 32-year-old woman of mixed race whose family were displaced during the second World War – is forced to drift, so finally the concept smacks not of restraint but disinterest.

One speaker may find succour in “a chorus of other voices”, but the form makes uncertainty feel glibly generic, as though everyone, irrespective of place, race, gender, age or creed, draws our doubts from the same well. Are you sure about that?

Runs until Oct 23rd