You Can’t Just Leave, There’s Always Something

Meet: Trinity College, Nassau Street gate

ARRIVING LATE to the meeting point, I catch up with the audience for this “immersive play” just in time to be ushered on to a bus and taken to a secret location. On board, the atmosphere is head-splittingly jovial. Ruing the fact I’m here alone, it takes a good five minutes and a “drunken” conversation with one of the actors before I realise it’s all part of the act.

At a dilapidated house in Rathmines, we make our way through the building, voyeurs of intimate conversations between friends, family and lovers, moving back and forth between a house party and a wake. So far so entertaining. The acting has flashes of great humour and tension, the scenes in themselves authentic. But as the play, ostensibly about “what it is to have a home”, draws to a close – 30minutes late – it fails to live up to its promise and it’s hard to see what the point was.

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