DERMOT HEALY'S Last Night's Fun (he also scripted Theatre Omnibus's previous and very successful outing) is a comedy with a quirky difference. The difference is sound, deployed as a means of communication as effective as the African tomtom.
Declan signals his arrival home from the night shift with a bang on a gong, eliciting a muted chime from his wife Gloria. His mother Maggie, next door in a granny flat, blows the whistle in more ways than one. A washing-line hung with utensils offers a cacophonous conduit to husband and wife in lieu of speech.
They also talk, in a terse dialogue which establishes the author as a master of the compound non sequitur, a flow of words which scrapes across the conversational grain.
The plot is less substantial than the psychic collisions, but there is a minimal one. Declan is disorientated between his day and night shifts and thinks that Gloria may be having an affair. She mollifies him between hankering after her home in England and having erotic dreams. Maggie, deserted by her own husband, fulminates in her flat. They make collective sense.
Bernard Dowd, Jean Regan and Mary Hurley are excellent as the trio, striking the right absurdist attitudes and tones. The author directs, and the inventive set, devised by the company, complements their work.
There is an air of comic originally about it all, of the seizing of an opportunity which only the stage could offer; the title is well chosen in terms of after-taste.
