Union Square/Helter Skelter

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin

REVIEW:There are a few reasons to suspect that the characters in this ethical teaser from Purple Heart Theatre Company are not all they seem. The artless out-of-towner we meet in the first short play of the double bill – lost in Union Square and clutching a Burger King bag – presumably contains a mouthful of surprises.

And as for the initial jollity of the married couple sitting down to dinner during a Christmas shopping trip in Helter Skelter– well, what are they hiding? We are right to be on our guard: their creator is Neil LaBute, a playwright who rarely imagines a tale without a twist or, more reliably, a sting.

LaBute has long specialised in constructing contemporary moral conundrums out of mythic materials. His theatre is up-to-the-minute; layering its naturalistic vernacular with references to 9/11, tsunamis, Jane Fonda movies and other atrocities. But his figures are increasingly drawn from a gallery of tragic archetypes – latter-day Oedipuses and Medeas wandering blind and vengeful through the city.

"I don't want this becoming some big thing," says Les Martin in Helter Skelter– "one of those Greek dramas." Once upon a time, an oracle sealed your fate. Now it's cross-references.

As the sole speaker in Union Square, Dermot Magennis compensates for any foreshadowing with the gently absorbing presence of an ingenuous gabber, playing down the grace notes of disturbance until the purpose of his journey becomes all too clear. The real departure, though, is in the role of the audience, cast as a single, homeless, silent listener. For all the magnificently icy charisma that Magennis puts into one smile, our own implication in his ambiguous horror story – the passive, confused, helpless watcher – leaves the longer chill.

Olga Wehrly, as the betrayed wife of a gormless husband, does something as skilfully foreboding, trimming what could be a genuinely amused laugh with the edge of hysteria.

It’s an accomplished, knife-edge balance to give a play that threatens to tip into comedy or even banality. There’s little that Les Martin can do, for instance, with his stammering stumblebum of a cheat and both Wehrly and LaBute wonder aloud if this cliche of suburban marital breakdown can transform into something devastatingly spectacular.

Like Union Square, it's a clever game in which director Stewart Roche concentrates on the artful manoeuvres of psychological performance while nudging playfully at self-referential conceits. If they don't quite acquire the epic resonance or tragic inevitability they seek, it is because LaBute lets Euripides do the groundwork for him. In "those Greek dramas", the climax is shocking, but barely a surprise. Here, it's the other way around. Until November 28