Volcano review: Edge-of-your-seat entertainment – you won’t have seen anything like this before

Volcano

Mick Lally Theatre, Galway

★★★★★

Somewhere in deep space, in Pod 261, two men are going slowly crazy. Volunteer members of the Amber Project, a human time capsule designed to “represent ourselves” to future life forms, the men spend their days enacting pop-cultural rituals and moments from their previous lives. Cued by communication from a radio in the corner, they perform snippets of quizshows and talkshows, wedding speeches and confessions.

Their primary tool for self-expression in the cramped, dingy room they are confined to is their bodies. With manic intensity, they do the twist. In a techno duet, they reach euphoric highs. They come together at elbow distance for an intimate slow set, in which they say their lines but also ask each other, ‘Is this as good as it gets?’ What happens, they begin to wonder, if they veer off the script?

This dance-theatre piece from Luke Murphy and Attic Projects is shaped across four 45-minute episodes, a structure borrowed from TV, although the storytelling is driven by physical expression rather than dialogue. Murphy’s choreography showcases the history of modern dance, from tableaux vivants of early-20th-century Greek-obsessed dancers like Raymond and Isadora Duncan through musical-theatre solos à la Fred Astaire to the strobe-lit energy of 1990s rave culture.

The plurality of references is also a showcase for his own skills as a dancer. Murphy performs with Will Thompson, and as we watch their relationship develop and dissolve we see intimacy, tenderness, frustration, rage and horror in their enacted codependency. The most startling achievement of Volcano, however, is how absolutely it holds the tension as the mystery of Pod 261 unfolds. It is edge-of-your-seat stuff.

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Volcano debuted at Galway International Arts Festival in 2021, for limited audiences in a Covid-constricted environment. The designers Alyson Cummins and Pai Rathaya have transferred the peep-show parameters of the original production into a bigger space, and the audience, seated on two sides of the perspex box in which the dilapidated-interior set is placed, still feel like voyeurs. Every element of the design is so well thought out, a set of visual clues to complement the snippets of information the audience uses to piece together the story.

Stephen Dodd’s lighting design is a remarkable feat of precision, utilising a variety of unconventional light sources and surfaces to create a restless uncanny effect. Composition and sound design from Rob Moloney, with a music mix by Chaz Moloney, is also an integral part of the storytelling.

Tense, troubling and touching, Volcano also interrogates representational practices within its highly artificial constructed reality, offering a new kind of storytelling in theatre to rival any other modern medium. It is not an overstatement to say that you will not have seen anything like this before.

Volcano continues at the Mick Lally Theatre, as part of Galway International Arts Festival, until Saturday, July 29th. Episode I: Monday, July 24th, 6pm and 8pm; episode II: Tuesday, July 25th, 6pm and 8pm; episode III, Wednesday, July 26th, 6pm and 8pm; episode IV: Thursday, July 27th, 6pm and 8pm; episodes I-IV together: Friday, July 28th, and Saturday, July 29th, 6pm