Alice in vain
The Alice Trilogy
Peacock Theatre
until 14 November
Everyday
Samuel Beckett Theatre until 28 October
The Alice Trilogy is a subtle, gentle play about a woman lost, presented with a jarring harshness in this production directed by author Tom Murphy.
The play reads with an innate simplicity, but is staged with a heavy-handed touch. The production stands on the beauty and sharpness of much of Murphy's writing, and Jane Brennan's "ownership" of this as the title character, but falls on key decisions by Murphy to intrude upon the integrity of this with theatrical conceits.
In the first of three acts, Alice, mother of three young children, is alone in the attic, drinking and talking to herself, trying to distract herself from what she fears may be incipient madness. She is accompanied on stage by an alter ego, Al, who is played by Mary Murray as an abrasive, sprite-like character – the jarring style of this turns what could be an incisive and poignant portrait of loneliness into something apparently more alien and absurd.
The second act is the strongest theatrically. Alice meets a boyfriend of 20 years earlier (Robert O'Mahoney) in a lane near her house. Their dialogue is poignant but also disturbed and the drama of the scene is compelling. And then a passing drunk disturbs them, provoking anger, possibly cathartic, from Alice. Both in Johanna Connor's design and in Murphy's direction, this deus ex machina is almost comic-book like, and the suspension of disbelief founded on the naturalism of Brennan and O'Mahoney's scene together is ruptured.
The third act, set some years later, finds Alice and her husband in an airport, awaiting the delivery of the body of their son, who has been killed in an accident while living abroad.
Again, there is the unlikely intervention from outside, this time a waitress in the airport restaurant who confides momentarily in Alice, proving a catalyst for an emotional watershed. And again, there is a striking directorial decision that jars: Jane Brennan's voice is amplified, acquiring an electronic air, for Alice's "internal" monologues (which comprise most of the scene). Brennan surmounts the alienating effect of this and her performance here is searing, yet the production left me with a sense of unrealised potential.
The dynamics are reversed in Michael West's new play with the Corn Exchange company, Everyday: here the interest lies almost entirely in the staging and design.
Like many recent productions on the Dublin stage, this isn't much of a play – in a very literal sense. Rather, it is a parade of characters, in a double-edged paean to a changing Dublin.
A struggling young mother, a Ukrainian nanny, a would-be "musician" teaching English to foreigners to get by, an old man being kicked out of his flat and the property company doing so: they bumble around the stage, deliver mini-monologues, and bump into each other, each telling their own short story in what turns out to be a tightly-woven circle of urban synchronicity.
Jane Cox provides a stunning backdrop and lighting, and Conor Linehan plays his own elegiac score live. The production is laced with gentle wit and observational comedy and the overall effect is quite beguiling, if not particularly provocative. The performances by the ensemble are striking. The company appears to be moving away from its in-house commedia dell'arte style to something still stylised, but more fluid. It is less distinctive, and less acutely funny, but that bit more human.
Mark O'Halloran delivers an extraordinary moment, singing Bowie's 'Life on Mars' in silhouette at the back of the stage. "It's the freakiest show," he sings, and – arms flailing and face caked in clown make-up – it looks apt, but the effect of the production is to make this parade of freaks seem like, well, home.