The Prophet of Monto

Axis Arts Centre, Dublin

How can a play with an unusual dependence on the phenomenon of heteropaternal superfecundation (twins born of the same mother by different fathers, seeing as you ask) and a blonde with glitchy psychic powers still seem dully familiar?

Partly, it’s the form of John Paul Murphy’s first work for the stage, a monologue play redolent of various Irish successes from its Martin McDonagh-esque The Noun of Somewhere title to the supernaturally tinged dialogue of Mark O’Rowe and the violence of both.

Zoe (Laoisa Sexton), the titular clairvoyant, might have seen it coming. A sales assistant in PhamaKing with the high heels of a pornstar and the make-up of a drag queen, she is significant for two reasons.

Firstly, she spies secret tragedies trailing from her customers “like clumps of bog roll sticking to their shoes” and can foretell even unhappier endings based on the faintest clue of someone buying a sack of painkillers and razor blades.

The love object (and I use the term advisedly) of honest and hard-working sap Liam, who toils to buy her an emerald, Zoe has a mild form of sixth sense. She sees sad people.

The second intriguing thing about Zoe, as described by Liam’s “brother from another father”, Larry (Michael Mellamphy), is that she is so depthless, unfaithful, deceitful, unrepentant and – of course – fatally sexy that even a cabal of misogynists would find her implausible.

Monologues, much like psychic powers, allow you to see what’s going on inside someone’s head, a courtesy Murphy never affords to Zoe. Having stolen her lover’s life savings and spent a week in bed with someone else, a less than conflicted Zoe confides that she feels “pure after what we done”.

In a good play, wrote Friedrich Hebbel, everyone is right. In Murphy’s play, everyone is hateful.

Director Des Kennedy, nervously aware of such problems, attempts to bridge the distance of empathy by keeping his two actors as close to the audience as possible: sitting among us, at times nearly treading on our toes.

Sadly, this makes the stage seem barren, often leaving one actor frozen awkwardly while the other speaks, quietly hoping we’ll look the other way.

The play’s structure doesn’t help. Storytelling requires plot development, momentum and destination (where are we going?). Tragedy involves an unstoppable current towards the inevitable. In the absence of either, we get brisk exposition and wearingly heavy emphasis instead: constant reminders that Liam is a self-deluding drip, Zoe is a heartless cow and Larry is very cross about the whole thing.

Murphy shows promise in throwaway kooky details, such as the dark foreboding that Zoe associates with the gift of a banoffee or lemon-meringue pie.

So involved in sour chuckles, though, the play finally becomes stranded in bathos. It’s always affecting to show how good people do bad things. Having bad people behave badly is just a piece of cake.

– Runs until December 3rd