Unanswered questions lie at the heart both of this elusive play by Mario Vargas Llosa and of Michael Scott's eagerly-awaited Belfast Festival production.
"What happened to Meche?" is the riddle that comes back to haunt four swaggering, self-styled superstuds after a long night of drinking and dicing, during which the beautiful girlfriend of their leader disappears into the darkness. Only the barmaid Chunga knows the answer - and she is not about to reveal it. The intrigue and shifting realities created by Vargas Llosa have all the makings of dramatic storytelling, but David Johnston's new translation sounds stilted and incoherent in the mouths of this cast and, hence, the thrust of the story is lost in the telling.
The most immediate difficulty is that none of the actors appears to have any sense of ownership or occupancy of character. Why, one wonders, are they required to speak with Northern accents when not one of them comes from the North and they are clearly uncomfortable with the vernacular? Where is the prickle of Latin sensuality, the sense of sultry heat and humidity that precipitates danger, instability and violence? They may have been there on the page and in the stage directions, but they were not communicated to the attentive and expectant first-night audience.
Jennifer Barry's bewildered Meche is no more than a commodity, put on this earth for the sole purpose of enabling others to enter the world of their sexual fantasies, graphically portrayed by the male characters with much grunting, writhing and ritual dropping of trousers. It is through her encounter with Tessa Wojtchak's gravelly-voiced Chunga that Meche briefly glimpses tenderness and understanding and, ultimately, acquires the wings to fly. The play contains the full range of Vargas Llosa's enduring themes and the missed opportunities for their exploration are, therefore, all the more regrettable. And those possibilities are temptingly set up by Scott's own plaintive score and moody lighting and Stuart Marshall's set design, which lead us, early on, to believe that we are in for a riveting evening.
Plays until Saturday, November 25th (booking at 048 90 381081)
