Father and Daughter (so the programme tells us) are confined to bed in a makeshift walled-off space within a room in a house. She cowers in a corner at the foot of the bed. He, under a coverlet with only his face showing, seems to be asleep. She wakes him and he starts talking like a mechanical doll which talks when a string is pulled. The talk is of how his smart suit is still damp from the wash he gave it the night before. He needs a smart suit to go to work in the storeroom of a furniture shop. His talk is violent, foul-mouthed, and frequently obscene until it stops and he subsides. She starts talking very rapidly about her dead mother and wonders if he is actually her father and, when she subsides, he starts off again.
And so they alternate. He has a notebook in which he lists his enemies, another in which he records the salesmen in the shop. She has a cheap paperback romance which she thinks her mother read - and she needs to read it to learn of the outside world - but she is afraid to start in case she cannot read it. He progresses to become a salesman, and there are some dirty tales to tell along the way until he owns three furniture shops, and then he kills his delivery van-man. He has another notebook on how to kill Mr B., and so it goes, turns about, until it becomes quieter and more tender and they exchange chaste kisses and all finally becomes quiet and restful. Maybe they are both dead and in some kind of hell and maybe she died of polio and maybe. . .maybe.
This 50-minute work is not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. At best it is enigmatic, at worst incoherent. Always it is grotesque. Directed by its author, Enda Walsh, it is acted with energy and precision by Peter Gowen and Norma Sheehan, in a lather of sweat with a mixture of menace and mirth, in a setting by Fiona Cunningham, lit by John Gallagher. It holds the attention magnetically in the newly refurbished and significantly improved New Theatre.
Until October 14th, 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.