Sylvia's Quest

Meet at the Grand Social, Liffey St, Dublin Until Aug 31 7pm (Sat and Sun mat 3pm) €16/€14 entertainment.ie

It isn’t easy to define the hero of Alice Coughlan’s promenade performance for Wonderland Productions. Partly that’s because the titular Sylvia first arrives as if from nowhere, shrouded in other voices. It’s also because her audience, hearing her words via headphones, embedded in a shifting soundscape, are also made agents of her quest, following her brisk path through Temple Bar in search of home. Rather than a fixed point, however, home serves as a misty destination and Sylvia as an unreliable guide.

A Bulgarian living in Dublin, Elitsa Dimova’s character has a lot going on, both personally and dramaturgically. Are the voices that we here the echoes of memory or a scrabble of sounds in her head? Coughlan never quite confirms, buffeting Sylvia between grim social realities as an exploited economic migrant, with a salty repartee to protect her from taunts and exploitation, consoling her with family phonecalls from Bulgaria and nudging her into mythical territory with the voice of a prophetess.

Informed by ancient Thrace and Greek mythology, and alluding to mental disorder, Sylvia’s journey through “the labyrinth” is inevitably complicated and often disorienting, But there are enough motifs and puzzles to guide us to the other side.

Can't see that? Catch this: Night of the Living Dead, Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny