THEATRE

By Mark Brown

Ballyturk

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Four Stars

Until October 20

Ballyturk, by the extraordinary Irish dramatist Enda Walsh, is a bleakly and brilliantly humorous play. Directed for the Tron with admirable precision and balance by Andy Arnold, it portrays two nameless men (called simply 1 and 2 in the script) who are, seemingly, trapped in an existential limbo.

Confined to a dog-eared room (which is splendidly envisioned by designer Michael Taylor), the pair construct and perform scenes from the lives of the people of the imagined town of Ballyturk. This little conurbation could be the village of Llareggub from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, if it was relocated to Ireland and conceived by someone who’s tripping on acid.

If Thomas seems present in Walsh’s phantasmagoria, one could be forgiven for wondering if the great modernist dramatists Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco had collaborated in the writing of the play from beyond the grave. The dismal and affecting co-dependency of 1 and 2 is pure Beckett.

Their seemingly arbitrary and surreal storytelling (including a tale about a rabbit with curiously human characteristics known as the “malevolent bunny”), is punctuated by voices heard through the walls and explosions of pop music from the 1980s. It all appears like the inspired, absurdist invention of a 21st-century Ionesco.

When Ballyturk made its world premiere at the Galway International Arts Festival, 1 and 2 were played by the outstanding actors Cillian Murphy and Mikel Murfi. Arnold (who, entirely reasonably, nods to the existential abstraction of the piece by playing it in Scottish, rather than Irish, accents) has secured the services of the talented double act of Simon Donaldson and Grant O’Rourke.

Donaldson is fabulously manic as the terror-stricken 1, who engages in the repetition and variation of the men’s rituals with a scorching urgency. O’Rourke’s performance, larger-than-life, hilarious in its characterisations and reverberating in its pathos, is truly virtuosic.

In the genuinely emotive conclusion to the play, a character known only as 3, arrives, suited, booted and sucking menacingly on a cigarette. Played by the fabulous Stephen Rea in the premiere production, the role is feminised interestingly and fruitfully here by the fine Wendy Seager. The choice she offers the wretched friends makes for a truly powerful denouement to a beautifully constructed production.

Arctic Oil

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Two stars

Until October 20

More than once on these pages I have lamented the fact that too many new plays staged in Scotland in the new millennium (and, inevitably, often staged at our self-defined “new writing theatre” the Traverse) have lacked the necessary imagination, ambition and theatrical vigour. Far too often we see dramas that seem to be written to a “soap opera with a twist” formula in which “naturalistic” dialogue is collided with melodrama and an issue-driven quest for socio-political relevance.

Clare Duffy’s short, new play Arctic Oil is, sadly but emphatically, such a drama. The piece is a heavy-handed throwing together (in a bathroom in a house on a northern Scottish island) of the most urgent contemporary politics with a crudely drawn, soap opera-style family drama.

The role of fossil fuels in the global ecological crisis is combined clumsily and predictably with the relationship between Jennifer Black’s unnamed climate change sceptic and her (also nameless) environmental activist daughter, played by Neshla Caplan. Issues of the daughter’s mental distress, the mother’s physical health and the alcoholism of the deceased husband and father are also thrown into the mix.

Fresh from his Edinburgh Fringe success with David Ireland’s blistering satire Ulster American, Traverse associate director Gareth Nicholls tries and (unavoidably) fails to bring some energy to a script that is unimaginative, insipid and lacking in conviction.

The great English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan famously defined a good play as “a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored.” The pity of Duffy’s drama is that it manages to induce tedium in just 65 ponderous minutes.