Irish Timeswriters review Roberto Zuccoat the Project in Dublin and The Biography of Bernie Wardat the Players Theatre in Trinity College.
Roberto Zucco
Project, Dublin
It is darkly tempting to think that the last victim of Roberto Zucco, the psychopathic killer with a glassy-eyed charisma, was his author, Bernard-Marie Koltès. First performed posthumously - Koltès died from Aids in 1989 - Roberto Zuccowas inspired by the story of Roberto Succo, the Italian serial killer (and serial escaper) who murdered his parents and several others. Koltès seems to have been seduced and consumed by Succo as a symbol; remorseless, relentless and utterly isolated.
Written in a pungent, restless prose, which curls with allusions and associations, Koltès uses words the way a chain-smoker uses cigarettes. His play now reaches us via Martin Crimp's crisp translation, its dry philosophy retaining the accent of the original, but Bedrock's production never commits itself to a particular time or place. Like the playwright, director Jimmy Fay is under the killer's spell, and attempts to make Zucco universal - the every-psycho.
The only person who seems inured to Zucco's apparent charisma is Aaron Monaghan; a good thing, really, as it is he who must play the part. If Zucco is a blank canvas for our imagination, Monaghan performs almost every scene slightly differently. First he is cartoonishly malevolent - even the door bows down before him - killing his mother and donning army fatigues. Later, he is fantasist, claiming to be a secret agent, then amnesiac, then catatonic, then frenzied. Monaghan recognises that Zucco is no secret agent - he's barely even an agent: things simply happen to him.
Society, then, becomes the play's principle character, with Zucco at its hollow core. Around him we find a grim panoply of equally anonymous, tenuously connected characters (Andrew Bennett, Dermot Magennis, Ronan Leahy, Kathy Kiera Clarke, Caitríona Ní Mhurchú and Andrea Irvine feature among a potentially dream cast, but the performance is never the sum of its parts). Frustratingly, no performer seems to share a common performance style, and, from video projections to random costumes, the overall aesthetic seems equally rootless. At least its gender politics offer some consistency: men are violent, rapacious or pathetic; women are mothers, whores or shrews.
The problem with using psychopathology as a metaphor for urban alienation is that it's just plain crazy. Emotional responses in Zuccoare invariably schizoid; its crux comes when a group of strangers devour Zucco's kidnapping and shooting as a titillating spectacle. That dull disconnection forcibly recalls Camus but chimes too with Genet, Beckett and the poster boys of European existentialism and ennui.
If Zuccocan still be an anti-hero for our times, it is in the explosive potential of the frustrated young male, a figure as prominent in international terrorism as city riots. But this production misses one crucial factor - racial tension - and in its cultural homogeneity it seems hermetically sealed, nihilistic but narcissistic. Paul O'Mahony's set, a grey prison of steel scaffolds and concrete slabs, lit with harsh stabs by Sinéad Wallace, reflects that inward focus. But, like the prisons and the mental hospitals, it cannot contain Roberto Zucco. The killer gives us the slip once more and his meaning evades us too. - Peter Crawley
• Runs until Sept 8
The Biography of Bernie Ward
Players Theatre, Trinity College
Who is Bernie Ward; who is he, she or it? Author Jesse Weaver keeps the answer from us some distance into his creative, funny and tragic play. But most of his stratagems become finally transparent.
A married woman (Beth), is about to go out seeking sex with the approval of her husband (Seth), who was born without male genitalia and does not wish her to be frustrated, as he is. They are respectively played by a man (Mark Gordon) and a woman (Sarah-Jayne Quigley).
There is a neurotic psychologist (Brenda Meaney) who plays mind-games with the couple, working up a fine head of sexual steam herself. Next door to her rooms, "the Gynosaurus" (Phil Kingston) offers them separately a variety of sexual devices and operations. These are purely functional, he warns; underneath the physical changes, everything remains the same.
As for Bernie Ward, he begins by being just a name, that of a dead partner of a colleague of the wife's. Later, he becomes he-Bernie and she-Bernie, names assigned to the couple by their quack lovers. He has no identity except that conferred on him by others. Their pain and machinations are his biography.
Much of this is laced with black humour and, for some 90 minutes, the author maintains his skein of relationships, offering audiences their own interpretations. It may all be a dream or, more credibly, four interlocking dreams. Director Nicholas Johnson gets wholly convincing performances from his cast, notably from an extraordinary Mark Gordon. Only one invention, a silent ghost in a white sheet, jarred. It might be Death - but don't quote me on that. - Gerry Colgan
• Ends on Sat
