For some 75 minutes of theatrical anarchy, a visit to the Samuel Beckett this week to see Pan Pan's production of Peepshow is just the ticket. It can be illogically funny, Marx Brothers-style, or threatening, as anarchic events often are in real life; but it is never neutral or dull.
As the action begins, four wheeled cubicles, rather like bathing huts on posh beaches, begin to swirl around the stage. Some panels are missing on each of them, enabling us to see - yes, to peep at - four characters who live together on a small housing estate. Some deft manipulation of pieces of furniture soon provides them with a communal kitchen and television lounge.
The quartet interact in various ways in their restricted environment. There is a little friction between them, and some apparent romance. They play music together on strange brass instruments that emit raucous sounds, which they clearly revel in. There is a surreal quality about their intertwined lives, not least because, as is the norm with Pan Pan, they communicate equally with words, sign language, music and mime.
And communication between people - the striving and the scale of the task - is one clear theme of the production. There are others, such as the nature of love, food versus aesthetics, social conventions and taboos, and more. Not many answers are offered for the audience's intellectual comfort, but one is guaranteed to leave the theatre stuffed with questions.
This is, among other things, very much actors' theatre, and the performances of Charles Kelly, Mark McCaffrey, Patrizia Barbagallo and Rod Chichignoud are physically and psychologically right. Director Gavin Quinn so conducts matters as to make a virtue of the work's surface obscurity; the magic is in the mix.
Continues until June 13th. To book, phone: 01-2800544.
Diptych Crypt Arts Centre, Dublin Castle By Louise East
Magpie Theatre Company's production of Diptych, written and directed by Magpie founder-member Louise Lowe, charts the inevitable decline of Joe Burke (Darren Walsh) from healthy dreamer to heroin casualty. Joe leaves work at a cardboard factory because he aspires to more, but he is quickly brought up short by the reality of unemployment. His wife, Laura (Louise Lowe), is supportive, claiming she loves him because he's different from all the other men, but she dreams of escape to normal domestic bliss.
Joe tries heroin in his search for an escape and soon he is selling anything left in the house to pay for his habit. Helped by two old friends, Freddie (John Smith) and Rachel (Robbie Mori), Laura manages to get him off heroin and on to methadone. However, when the "buzzing" in his head becomes too much, Joe fatally shoots up again, in a toe-curling scene made even more effective by being the only one in which props are employed.
Much of the action takes the form of flashbacks from the present, where Joe is in a kind of purgatory watching the mess he's made of his life. The play is also bookended by mime pieces, which act like a Greek chorus obliquely spelling out the motivations and consequences of the action on stage. These slow-motion vignettes acted out by all four members of the cast are possibly the strongest part of the play, helped along by Paul Winters's stark and sometimes startling lighting against Gillian Ni Chaiside's bleak set.
Darren Walsh gives a very physical and well-judged performance as Joe and Louise Lowe brings just the right shade of steely pathos to the role of Laura.
Continues until June 20th. To book, phone: 01-6713387
