Playwright-director Enda Walsh, whose Disco Pigs is currently being made into a film, is on similar territory with Bedbound, his dank, puke-stained new yarn. Again, it is a two-hander, this time about a father and daughter who are hemmed into a room only big enough for a filthy bed.
From time to time, the father roars up in his dirty, frayed suit and trumpets about how he ruthlessly fought to become the leading furniture dealer in Cork. Along the way, he sacrificed himself, the daft minions who worked for him, his marriage and his infirm daughter, whom he imprisoned in barbaric, bloody-minded shame. After periodic brainstorms, he buries himself abjectly in the bedspread. Then the wraith-like daughter, who cannot bear the silence, begins to voice her own headful of memories.
Apart from brief, abusive interchanges, the pendulum swings rhythmically between their separate monologues. She at first cowers before his physical menace, yet as he lays bare more atrocities, she gains power, culminating in a redemptive moment that dubiously celebrates their squalid, mutual dependency.
Walsh is still dredging the dialect and landscape of gutty, underclass Cork, and once again, he puts a galloping topspin to the manic deliveries, leaving you grappling with the onslaught of forceful, wilfully queasy vocabulary. He gets fierce performances from his actors. Peter Gowen thrashes out a sweat-dripping picture of the self-pitying, murderous father, while Norma Sheehan nicely renders the defiant whine of the Cork accent. Physically too, she twists herself into pathetic contortions, with a psychiatric strobe of tics. And she goes way beyond realism in the heart-rending scene when the father reads her a page of a romantic novel.
It's an odd piece, with its mixture of child world and murderous male instincts. One wonders whether a less young-headed style might have better put across the tale. You can see the bones of the plot poking through the skin. But it carries a memorable whack.
• Until October 14. Box office: 00-353-1-677 2600.
