Request Programme

Elysian Tower, Cork Jun 13-Jul 7 8.30pm (Fri and Sat 6.30pm 8.30pm) 12.50- 20 midsummer.com 021-4905004

We've probably all felt close to the extraordinary actor Eileen Walsh at some point, and not always comfortably. She was a provocative confidant in Enda Walsh's original Disco Pigs,an acutely poignant housewife in the film of Eugene O'Brien's Eden, someone who took you by the elbow in Mark O'Rowe's Terminusand rushed you, breathless, through a fantastical Dublin night.

Now, in Corcadorca’s latest site-specific production for the Cork Midsummer Festival, you can spend 45 wordless minutes in Walsh’s company as the young, isolated Miss Rasch returns home from work, turns on the radio, performs her daily routine, and decides to die.

Franz Xaver Kroetz, the German dramatist behind Request Programme, made his reputation in the 1970s with brief naturalistic sketches of the underprivileged, etching out an inarticulate existence on the fringe of the German "economic miracle". With the spectacular collapse of our own economy, dragging society into its wreckage, such silent human consequence deserves urgent attention.

Despair, Kroetz knew, had a banal, everyday shape, like a workaday existence or a radio request show, but it takes an unflinching gaze and a sensitive performance to realise its tragedy. In a small apartment, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival, director Pat Kiernan and Walsh are reunited to turn up the volume.

Can’t See That? Catch This

Francis Frances,

Focus Theatre, Dublin