Lives drily explored on sterile stage

Academically, it is near impeccable, this portrayal by Thomas Kilroy of Oscar and Constance Wilde, each prisoners of their own separate conventions, each convention redolent with echoes of the language which either would use, she privately and he publicly.

In terms of theatrical ritual, Patrick Mason's production in Joe Vanek's impressively pure monochrome stage designs with Nick Chelton's exquisite lighting providing calculated colours; David Bolger's beautifully expressive use of the movements of the "Chorus" and their deeply affecting puppets is near perfect.

Intellectually, it is accurate and thoughtful, challenging its audience to think of the social and sexual mores and opportunities of the characters, and the time in which they lived.

But so carefully objective is the text, and so ritually distanced is the production from any kind of instinctive human interaction that there is virtually no emotional magnet in the evening to attract the full engagement of the audience.

There is never any prospect of catharsis because we are not allowed to align ourselves with one or another of the attitudes or actions of the three people we ought, dramatically, to be concerned about: Oscar, Constance or Bosie.

We are listening to a lecture or admiring a demonstration: we are never invited, as a live audience, to engage emotionally in what is going on.

The evening is thus, despite the admirable excellence of its component parts, dramatically sterile. Among the excellent components are the precise movements and body language of the white-masked chorus of mute attendants who appear both to control and comment upon the actions of the three protagonists.

Jane Brennan's Constance is nicely and conventionally portrayed as a precise mixture of respectability and guilt.

Robert O'Mahoney's Oscar starts from the disadvantage of having to overcome multitudinous previous and often caricatured portrayals of Oscar but eventually becomes his own, different, man, and the small incidental demonstrations of genuine affection between both Constance and Oscar are occasionally affecting.

Andrew Scott's Bosie is suitably shrill and not at all affecting, and it is no coincidence that both Oscar and Bosie at different times seek a brotherly-sisterly relationship with Constance.

It is equally significant that Oscar's and Constance's children - the subject of major conflict between them in this presentation of their lives - are small puppets manipulated by those masked attendants. Live children might have added too much direct emotion to this dry exploration.

Maybe there is more emotional life in the text, or more theatrical liveliness in the author's stage directions, than was apparent on the dramatically sterile stage last night.

And that exploration can now be undertaken because Peter Fallon's ever-attentive Gallery Press has published the play-script to coincide with this first production of an important but apparently arid new Irish play.