Video, synthesisers and an expertly managed sound and lighting control system buttress the new Meridian production at the Everyman Palace. The River is a collaboration between artistic director Johnny Hanrahan and writer and musician John Browne, who is also the director.
Thematically concentrating on the presence and influence of a river's course through a city - a concept which yields at least one moment of compelling beauty in which the pleated video-screen pulsates with coloured riverine immensity - the piece becomes more complex than the text can justify. The play's real drama eventually emerges as the tentative but beautifully realised love growing between Orla FitzGerald's young Simon worker and James Gilroy's haunted wanderer. The tension between this affirmation (accentuated by a plangent guitar) and the nihilism of the sinister Jack Kavorkian-like artist played by Darren Lawless should be the impulsion of the piece, but impulsion and tension are not terms which apply to this production.
Presented backstage on a set fuming like an opium den with video commentaries on the action and linked by Browne's ominous score, the stylistic lethargy (the suspicion that it could be just laziness is banished by respect for Gina Moxley and the rest of the cast) makes it impossible to ignore a suspicion that much of this is simply pretension.
Continues at the Everyman Palace until September 30th; booking at 021-501673; runs at the Project Arts Centre Dublin from October 11th to 21st as part of Dublin Fringe Festival. Booking at: 1850 260027