Occasionally one has the sense of a production, usually of a new play, freewheeling downhill from its conception to its opening night. Over the edge it goes, to the dismay of its audience. How on earth did it happen that no one shouted stop?
I suppose that the faith a theatre company has in its own creations is of the blind variety, perhaps necessarily. But the glaring flaws in Boomtown are of a kind that the accomplished Rough Magic company ought to have recognised. Three authors, even of the calibre of Declan Hughes, Pom Boyd and Arthur Riordan, are two too many; and there, I think, the slide began.
The opening scenes are played at a rate of knots. The Pope is about to arrive in the Phoenix Park. Not far away, in Temple Bar, there is a car crash, and from it emerge a randy politician, a crooked property speculator, a muck-savage husband and wife duo and a sultry secretary. Others arrive, the air is filled with effing and blinding, copulation in the crashed cars is rife and human caricatures abound.
It is near-axiomatic that comedy likes to be seduced, not raped. Funny wigs, odd postures, routine profanity and frantic physical movement don't cut it, not to mention plot-lines so tenuous that they soon become irrelevant. Laughter was generally absent for all this, probably off hiding its head somewhere.
Twenty years on, and it felt like it, the mayhem mercifully trundles to an end. The characters have all moved on in predictable ways, mostly to do with money-making, but are still noisily grotesque. There is some kind of conspiracy to sell and privatise Ireland, but nobody cares any more. This duck is dead.
A top-drawer cast - Darragh Kelly, Mark O'Regan, Anna Healy, Amelia Crowley, Brian Doherty, Kathy Downes, Gary Cooke and Eileen Walsh - is wasted. Lynne Parker directs them with technical efficiency and pace in Gabby Dowling's tiered amphitheatre setting. Everything and everybody work well save the play itself; but that, alas, is what matters most.