The promise of a new playwright's first play is seldom fulfilled in his second, and such is the case with the still energetic and thoughtful Pat Kinevane. His second work to be seen on the Dublin stage has some remarkable moments of melodramatic power woven through his dark text, a reworking of the story of Persephone set in very rural Ireland in the 1960s. But it is a clumsy text in which, far too often, the characters must wade through lines about what other folk did or are doing which do little to enhance the dramatic impetus of the piece. It is also encumbered with a clumsy device whereby, in order to inject some operatic music (effective in itself) one character remains almost throughout behind a scrim cyclorama. There is a kind of land war going on between the Denis family and the Power family, and when Kora (Persephone) Denis is extricated from a higher-than-usual-voltage electric fence by Hady (Hades?) Power, she falls for him and his smooth talk. The interfamily hatreds cause her to desert her brother Seamar, a dedicated, caring psychiatric nursing aide, and her mother, whose hatred of the Powers is all-consuming. Her sister Julia is in Italy training to be an opera singer (the figure behind the scrim) and Kora is learning Italian in order to visit there and become a tour-guide. Kora's closest confidante is Hundreds McCarthy (so called because she used to smoke hundreds of cigarettes), who is a potter and a herbalist. But, as things turn out, maybe Mrs Denis's prejudices against the Powers were well founded and Kora's young life turns out to be a kind of hell.
Jim Culleton's direction for the Fishamble Theatre Company seems to amplify the clumsinesses of the play and has none of the compelling flow with which he invested The Nun's Wood, Kinevane's first play. Kieran McNulty's sprawling setting is significantly inadequate in defining the many different acting areas required by the plot. The acting is uneven, with none of the sense of ensemble evident in The Nun's Wood, and Eileen Colgan's Mrs Denis seemed distracted on the night, as if to distance herself from all the narrative she had had to cover in what should have been highly-charged dialogue. Noelle Brown was several shades too strident as Hundreds and while Enda Oates as Hady and Fionnuala Murphy came into their own very effectively towards the end, they were in different ways too innocuous by far at the start. Frank Mackey's Seamar was the most consistently persuasive character throughout, and Niamh O'Brien was an effectively sweet-voiced Julia.
Runs until Saturday. Booking from 01-4544472.
