Sodome, My Love

Project, Dublin

The curtain rises at a glacial pace, revealing a space of muted hues and worn textures, dim pools of lights and a wall of translucent mirrors. This could be a lost city, or a discotheque after the apocalypse. A voice emerges, cracking with effort, desiccated by time, but so amplified and disembodied that it isn’t clear to whom it belongs – to the huge white face, still as a sarcophagus, appearing as a video projection in the corner of the space, or to the body, folded and twisted under a mane of white hair, on a corroded metal bench? “Do you remember Sodome?” it asks. Well, not like this.

It isn’t easy to look back on Sodom, as Lot’s wife learned to her cost, but French playwright Laurent Gaudé’s new play – here receiving its world premiere from Rough Magic in association with The Emergency Room, in a translation by its performer, Olwen Fouéré – seems to revisit another city. Not the biblical depiction of aggression and perversity, or an age-old gay slander, but a well-functioning bacchanalian pleasure ground. “At its mere mention, long lines of sensual bodies invade your souls,” says Fouéré’s character, an eternal figure released from a prison of salt, who is either Sodome’s last inhabitant or narrating a travel programme about it. “You imagine the orgies, the nights without end, the wine flowing on the torsos of men.” Gaudé’s story is less concerned with pleasure than the idea of unexpected contagion, as the gradually uncoiling Fouéré finally reconnects with her voice to describe the city’s fall, succumbing to a Trojan-horse tactic of a visitor concealing a disease.

From here, Gaudé’s metaphor becomes elusive, dwelling on the surface details of the sacking of the city and Fouéré’s imprisonment. Is the play alluding to holy wars, misogynist politics or the decimation of sexually transmitted disease? Director Lynne Parker seems undecided, and the production busies itself instead with startling design, letting Jack Phelan’s video design nudge this Sodome towards contemporary cities with images of urban motion: a constellation of traffic headlights, a blur of metro stations. Fouéré, her delivery moving from anguished to strident, is always a commanding figure, dressed by Monica Frawley in a conspiracy of whites. Yet it is designer John Comiskey who is the star of the show, creating a staggering interplay of set and lights that contains more surprises and more lyricism than the text.

Resolving to wreak “a revenge that is carried through the senses” against the descendants of Sodome’s puritanical destroyers – whom, you get a goading feeling, are supposed to be us – the character finally becomes a vampish parody of seduction in red lipstick and high heels, standing before a blitzkrieg of pouting media icons. Bled of her appeal, she seems neither infiltrator nor antidote to our depthlessly sexualised society, and it seems an ill-judged, self-consciously silly note with which to conclude an otherwise striking display. Until Mar 27