Hollywood wrecks Oedipus

Ed Harris commands the stage with the comfort of a cabaret performer, but neither he nor Neil LaBute's new play are provocative or exciting, writes Colin Murphy

This is a story of two plays and one actor. Neil LaBute's Wrecks, a monologue performed by Hollywood actor Ed Harris, is a play with a twist in the tale, a twist so severe as to divide the play into two distinct dramas, before and after.

Like all good twists, in retrospect it seems blindingly obvious, not least because it is amply signaled in the title.

"Wrecks" has little to do with the content of the play, and everything to do with its homophone, "Rex" – as in Oedipus Rex. (In case that's not clear enough, the twist is revealed below.)

Unlike the original – or most dramatic – tragedy however, LaBute's protagonist's fate is not signaled from the off. What unfolds is a gentle, folksy tale of suburban Americana, apparently devoid of tragic or even manifestly dramatic overtones.

LaBute sets his play in the back room of a funeral parlour, where Ed Harris plays a widower taking a break from the obsequies out front.

Sucking on successive cigarettes and enticing the audience in with arching eyebrows and knowing smiles, he talks us through his life, his marriage and his business. He is a genial sort, and his is an inoffensive tale of true love and simple successes in the face of the adversity that life routinely throws up. There were obstacles to be overcome – notably that his wife was married when they first met, and 15 years his senior.

He is a hard man softened by his wife's tenderness, a man simple of language but capable of coining a striking and poetic phrase, or of indulging a cliché, in searching to describe his philosophy and his love.

Such is the stuff of the first 50 or so minutes of this 60-minute play.

Harris's oration gently builds towards a climax, imposed not so much by any dramatic inevitability in the script as by the knowledge that the play must soon be over.

As his wife drew her final breaths, he tells us, she imparted a secret, one which she had held her whole adult life. As a girl, she had been raped by an uncle, and had had a child. She was sent away, the child was given up, and she returned to her family.

Harris tells us he reassured her with just four words, and she died peacefully. He doesn't tell us what he said, but from what then emerges, it might well have been, "I love you, Mum". He knew her secret, because he was her rape child. He had spent his young adulthood seeking out his mother, and when he found her and realised he could never have her as a mother, sought to have her in the way that seemed most feasible, as his lover.

What LaBute succeeds in doing, in marked contrast to Lars Noren's contemporary exploration of the Oedipus myth in last week's Blood, is to challenge us to judge the relationship not by the standards of conventional taboo, but by its apparent success in making two troubled people happy. As an idea, it is striking and dramatic. But as a play, it is unsatisfying.

By building his narrative around the conceit of the late-coming twist, LaBute reduces this concept to an almost shock value, and deprives us of the opportunity to view it through the unfolding lens of the drama. Thus the play becomes two: a gentle, rambling tale of an apparently inconsequential love affair, and a succinct and provocative tale of incest.

Of course, the point of a twist is to provoke the audience to review the action up to the twist, searching for the clues they missed and reviewing all they knew in the light of the development – but this is less easy to do with a stage play than with a book, where we can leaf back through the pages, or with a film, where we're normally granted flashbacks.

The problem is exacerbated both by LaBute's apparently slack writing and by Harris's crowd-pleasing performance, both of which rob the piece of any dramatic momentum.

Harris is a masterful entertainer. He commands the stage with the comfort of a cabaret performer and draws a huge and personal applause at the end. But his facial tics and repeated resource to cigarettes and to improvised repartee with the audience – whom he rebukes on a number of occasions for coughing – distract from his tale and performance; at one point he loses his flow and has to search for his place in the story.

He described his attraction to the project in an interview in the Sunday Times: "It was two weeks in Cork, which sounded good to me". If they spent longer than that putting it together, it doesn't show.

?More Wrecks by Neil LaBute at the Everyman Palace, Cork until 3 December.

Tickets €23/€15. 021 450 1673, www.everymanpalace.com