I saw two plays this week as part of the 10 Days in Dublin festival – Odd Sense’s Alpha & Omega and The Sting’s The Maids. Due to a lack of situational awareness on my part, I ended up sitting on bare wood for the duration of both, so the Numb Arse Test can be applied for the purposes of a capsule review – during Alpha & Omega I minded, during The Maids I did not.
Alpha & Omega is the story of two (initially) charming youngsters, Alph and Meg, living a sheltered, orderly life in an underground bunker, with only the disembodied voice of a computer to keep them company. Despite their situation, they’re bright and carefree, and the ominous feeling you get as the implications of this discrepancy set in is one of the more satisfying aspects of the performance.
Where it falls down is in the tension between fable and psychological realism – the archetypal nature of the characters, their balletic presence on the stage, puts the play into the realm of the former, but in its treatment of the material it’s clearly striving for the latter. The two approaches don’t mesh well – the play is determined to be profound, but it covers too many ideas in too little detail to really earn it. What little conflict there is between the two characters is just a device to allow one of them to further expound a singular viewpoint. For all that though, there are interesting themes (for instance, the effect of a limited cultural diet on imagination) and I’d love to see what writer Clara Kumagai could do if she took a more focused approach.
If Alpha & Omega lacks conflict, The Maids has it to spare. It starts innocuously enough, but before long the titular maids, Claire and Solange, are tearing into each other with aplomb. The energy seesaws back and forth in a way that seems somewhat disjointed at first, but as time goes on things start to click into place, and it becomes a genuinely gleeful spectacle. The performances at times might be a fridge too far for some – particularly towards the end, where one maid is practically clambering up on the furniture, Gollum-style – but I got the sense that the company enjoys undercutting the essential melodrama of the piece. This is never more apparent than with the sudden appearance of the third member of the company, James Butler, who cuts an elegantly coiffured figure as the mistress of the house.
Having said that, it’s by no means an outright comedy, and the performance does have genuine dramatic weight. The two leads, Roisin Agnew and Jane Deasy, give superb physical performances, and there are times when a few subtle gestures and expressions hit far, far harder than the overwrought dialogue. And they get no little help from the wonderful venue, St Mary’s Abbey – at one point, after a particularly crackling exchange of dialogue, the maids suddenly lapse into a prolonged, staring silence, and it’s as if the air has been sucked out of the room.
For more information on these and other performances, see http://www.10daysindublin.ie/.
