Test Dummy review: a study in damage that can’t get beyond the wreckage

Theatre Upstairs, Dublin

** With a traumatic sexual history and a fractured psychology, the young woman at the centre of Caitríona Daly's new play identifies implicitly with hollow, unfeeling objects. Anxiously preparing to go clubbing, Caitriona Ennis's speaker first compares herself to a Barbie doll, lacquered in fake tan and lipstick. "It doesn't exist," she says. "I'm trying to."

But the object that tumbles more frequently through her inner monologue is that of a crash test dummy, a self-image born from a very early age through unhappy and dehumanising sexual contact, which she now projects through a dysfunctional adulthood. The play title says it all: here is a study in damage.

“If words could walk, mine would be paraplegic,” says the woman, a line whose clumsiness is hard to put down to character alone.

Indeed, with a heavy reliance on alliteration and homophones (more than once, a man fumbles at “his prize to prise”, for instance), the play’s stream-of-consciousness more closely resembles an exercise in overwriting.

Nonetheless, its style suggests that early traumas have resulted in a tormented mind with limited powers of social expression.

“I never wanted neuroses,” says Ennis’s character, although it’s hard to say what else the play has given its nameless speaker, revealing her victimhood and little else in an elliptical history.

Entirely alone, she internalises a debased self-image enforced by faceless abusers: “Some hole to park your bench in. Because I think I’d f**k anything if it made me feel better.”

Without much indication of external realities – a personal context, say, or robbed potential or any meaningful evocations of friends or family – director Louise Lowe emphasises the play’s psychological confinements with a directly confrontational performance.

Ennis eyeballs her audience, divided on either side of Laura Honan’s claustrophobic set, speaking mostly in the second person. Carl Kennedy’s unsettling soundscape heightens the ambiguity of her address.

A mind apparently divorced from a body, is she talking to herself, any number of male exploiters through the years or her audience? “You are wrapped up in his desire,” she admonishes herself, “and he is wrapped up in your c**t.”

Such is the vicious cycle of the play, where sex and intimacy have been irrevocably split apart, dehumanising both women and men, that the character finds self-worth only in her desirability while recoiling from human touch.

“All desire is gone. You are just a test dummy,” she says. “I am happy to oblige.” Without struggle, support or alternative, her destruction seems complete.

Until November 26th