Guest Host Stranger Ghost
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
Here’s a project built around a genuinely original high concept. Kate Heffernan’s new play for Once Off Productions is nomadic affair (or maybe a cuckoo affair) that flits about Dublin Theatre Festival and settles down in other people’s sets for the afternoon. The opening performance takes place among the drums and keyboards laid out for Thisispopbaby’s 0800 Cupid at Project Arts Centre. Maeve O’Mahony, who plays one of three housemates, explains that, as is the case when renting a property, certain rules apply about what they can use and what smells they can leave behind.
The metatheatrical strategy looks to be concerned, in part, with addressing the insecurity of tenure for so many young people in contemporary Ireland. In a few days the production will be shuffled along to Smock Alley. Then the Gate. Heffernan is (as the programme helpfully explains) particularly focused on the nursing-homes support scheme, aka Fair Deal, the Government programme under which families can rent out elderly relative’s homes to help pay for their nursing care.
O’Mahony’s character, who compiles indexes for a publisher, is, as we begin, living in only mildly uneasy harmony – and perpetual gloom – with an old pal in the cheese business (Finbarr Doyle). They are exchanging the usual sort of flatmate inanities when a delivery man (Shadaan Felfeli) arrives with Chinese food. He asks to charge his phone. His bike gets vandalised. After one thing and another, he ends up living in the house.
The gossamer-light script works the specific in with the general. We learn that all the previous occupant’s goods are tidied into boxes and locked away where the tenants never go. Should she die, O’Mahony explains, they will get no period of grace before the house is sold. Relatives will be rooting through cupboards as they plan the wake.
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Guest Host Stranger Ghost is, however, mostly concerned with the everyday tensions and boredoms that accompany communal living. Doyle’s character suspects the new arrival of doing something untoward in the shower. Too much staring at a too-close screen looks to be sending the index compiler slightly deranged. Their latest companion, in an amusing aside, suggests unsubscribing from unwanted mass emails as a relief for everyday tension. All this plays out to the constant ringing of a landline as, the friends plausibly assume, scammers try to contact the now-institutionalised houseowner.
The interactions are carried off with delicacy and charm by talented actors who look to have the measure of one another. But, sadly, the drama proves to be slight and the stakes low. The play comes across as an exploratory exercise aimed at establishing characters and relationships for later, more diverting adventures – what would, in television, be called a pilot.
And this first outing is, indeed, just one part of a wider exercise. It would be fascinating to learn how the cast cope as, without any rehearsal in that afternoon’s space, they move through sets of contrasting complexity and expanse. An experiment worth indulging.
Continues at various venues, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 13th
