The first thing that strikes you about Druid’s New Electric Ballroom is the shockingly spare stage design. The lavish promises of the play’s title are dispelled immediately upon seeing the set. Immense grey walls wrap a raked floor and bare furniture. And with that misconception firmly in place, the gaudy colours of hope, regret and habit splash across the stage in Walsh’s absurdist tragedy. The setting, while indisputably Irish, is not any physical place, but that recognisable hinterland that borders Beckett and Ionesco, a place where ideas wear the flesh of people. 3 female siblings are trapped in an epic regurgitation of their memories of the New Electric Ballroom. For the youngest, her incarceration in these memories is vicarious- she is so familiar with the stories of a place she’s never been she prompts the elder sisters in their faltering and reluctant retellings of the dashed hopes of romance. It … There’s more →