THEATRE: Oedipal complex

This week, it's incest, war, torture and patricide. Colin Murphy reviews the Irish premiere of a play about a family exiled from Pinochet's Chile, Blood

The Project Arts Centre's Blood, which runs until 3 December, is a play with flashes of intelligence, vigorously acted and elegently staged. But it is laden with what must be the weakest, most preposterous plot seen on the Dublin stage for some time.

Here is what happens. After the Pinochet coup in Chile (in 1973), a young left-wing couple are imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately forced into exile, leaving behind a seven year old son. Their last memory of their son is in hospital, where he was being treated for an injured foot.

The couple resettle in France, and rebuild their lives; she as a journalist (an eminent war correspondent), he as a psychoanalyst. They make attempts to find their son later, but fail, and his absence haunts them. Her work takes her abroad, and the couple largely live apart, distant from each other emotionally as well.

Then husband falls for one of his male patients, an unstable man young enough to be his son, of apparently Hispanic background. They become lovers, and the husband promises to leave his wife, but procrastinates. During a fight, the young man hurts his foot and mentions how his foot has always been weak, since a childhood accident.

Through a chance encounter, the wife meets the young man, and they have a mesmerising effect on each other. Later, she follows the young man home, and they make love, after which she notices his injured foot.

Then her husband, the young man's lover, walks in on them. Father, mother and son are confronted with each other and their actions, and then the son kills his parents.

Were this a film, that would be the pitch: it looks like a piss-take, akin to the fictitious musical Springtime for Hitler in the ongoing Broadway hit, The Producers (the musical that's intended to be a flop, so the impresarios can make off with the investment cash).

In fairness to this production, individual scenes rarely appear preposterous, and the play is staged with a seriousness of intent and a brave physicality that make the production impressive. The scenes individually appear like mini-dramas of existentialist angst, with over-articulate characters railing against their inability to fully comprehend their existence and their emotional inadequacy, dependent for survival upon relationships which are ultimately destructive.

This is at its most explicit and visceral in a scene where the wife demands that her husband beat her up, re-enacting a ritual of abuse that is clearly a legacy of their imprisonement in Chile.

There are original devices in the staging which look like good ideas that didn't quite work: a prolonged conversation which takes place over the intercom; and an extended scene where the husband replays messages on his answering machine while (simultaneously, on stage) the wife is interviewed on live televison, which is being "broadcast" in his living room.

Peter Gaynor's performance as the young man, Luca, is very strong, a convincing portrait of a dangerously manic young man. Conor Mullen as the husband, Eric, appears hampered by the apparent aloofness of his character, while Ingrid Craigie as his wife gives a meticulously controlled performance as a woman very close to losing control. Annabelle Comyn as director does well with a very challenging script and the enforced intimacy of the small space. Paul O'Mahoney's set is cleverly designed and effective as well as elegant.

Like Shelagh Stephenson's Enlightenment, which played at the Peacock earlier this year, this is a play which purports to confront issues of violent injustice (in this, that of Pinochet's Chile; Enlightenment was about an English couple whose son appeared to have been killed in the 2002 Bali bombing). But the confrontation is bogus: instead they give us stories in which historical atrocities are like Sky News in the pub, an occasionally jarring background distraction. The intrusion of political conflict is a device to give the drama some contemporary "edge", and to allow the authors play with postmodern ideas of interaction between action and representation, between event and media and audience – and, in the case of Blood, to play with classical constructs.

In Blood, the separation of the family in Chile, and the parents' imprisonment and exile, is merely a vehicle for author Lars Noren to construct a contemporary Oedipus tale. He writes some good dialogue, with occasional turns of phrase that are manage to be both surprising and incisive, and has created three characters who are each compelling in their troubled iolation. But the laboured (and failed) attempts to construct a plausible Oedipus narrative around them overwhelm the play and drown his characters.

It is not enough for Noren to create characters who have had to negotiate the traumas of violence, exile and abandonment. He has to set them further challenges: a postmodern one, of subjecting them to the invasions of the media; and the classical one, of subjecting them to the fate of Oedipus' family. In doing so, he renders his drama both pretentious and improbable, and lessens both the dramatic value and the moral force of those original traumas. His play is not disturbing, but this is.

?More Blood by Lars Nor»n Presented by Hatch theatre company at the Project Arts Centre until 3 December 01 8819613. www.project.ie