Ellamenope Jones

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

For a character named after the softest string of letters in the alphabet, Ellamenope Jones is amazingly vicious. Just look at the scarlet sneer she gives each hopeless inductee to her pyramid scheme, which – with less than Machiavellian cunning – she refers to as “a pyramid scheme”.

In Randolph SD’s bitingly comic new musical, Kathy Rose O’Brien’s ferocious diva dangles her microphone above her, like a fire-eater addressing a flaming torch; in her flows of self-actualising jargon or witty aphorisms it’s unclear whether we should love or despise her. Writer/director Wayne Jordan can seem similarly undecided – full of considered spleen, yet fascinated by everything she stands for.

That, however, is as far as Ellamenope goes. More symbol than flesh, she’s a personification of avarice, but never a person. As with a pyramid scheme of character development, details widen the further down you go.

Elaine Fox plays Sophie Sunday, an overweight woman stewing in self-help books and exercise videos, introduced with the lush detail of a shooting script. “The camera retreats,” says Fox of her sorry scene. “What else can it do?”

The personal scam is hardly an elaborate metaphor for economic concerns, but Jordan’s moral distaste for capitalist coercion and complicity – here a form of bullying – thickens with each woman. Sarah Greene’s luscious materialist, Cryola Box, inducts her anxiety-riddled sister, Cleopatra (Louise Lewis), who in turn approaches a lonely, sceptical Ukranian cleaner, Cassandra Crowe (Natalie Radmall Quirke), until finally the scheme becomes violently unsustainable.

The plot, developed through improv, threatens to do likewise but this matters less than its arch, self-aware depiction. Sinéad Wallace's design (all dancing lights with no set) allows ample room for Carl Kennedy's score, a persuasive Broadway tribute with adventurous departures. It's best when it tells the story rather than embellishes it, such as with My New Amazing Life, a duet between a soulful Greene and a radiantly sad Radmall Quirke, sung from opposite ends of Ireland's glittering potential. (Let's assume this isn't set in the present.)

The most effective moment comes without music, though, as Lewis’s Cleopatra is forced to drown imaginary kittens for “proper dreams of owning things”. It all takes place in the mind, but its effect is stunningly real. For all her quotable lines and racy dancing, that is where Ellamenope Jones lands her smartest punch. This dream was always a dazzling scam, her riches-to-rags narrative reminds us, an endless promise built on nothing.

Runs until 11th December