Rescue Annie: A grim history of loneliness

RESCUE ANNIE

Abbey Theatre, Peacock stage
Dublin Theatre Festival
★★☆☆☆
We are what we are because we've been what we've been, or so the Freud goes. Lauren Shannon Jones and Eoghan Carrick's new play flirts with psychodynamics but takes them along a sad exploration of unknown, perished women. Can our personal hang-ups have something to do with their myths?

We first meet Jones as a public speaker, giving a presentation about emotional isolation as a society-wide phenomenon. Self-doubts about intimacy are traced back to a poor history of representation, of how women characters are underwritten in art masterpieces, of the disappearance of deeper, complex lives in the wake of tragedy. The introduction of a half-smiling mannequin named Annie – the world’s original CPR simulator, modelled on an unidentified French woman who drowned in the Seine in the 1880s – gives the play an arch conceit: a woman whose true life is unknown, who draws attention only when someone else breathes life into her.

There is a less abstract play in here: a psychological drama about an outbreak of isolation, made possible by sad inheritances. With more lyrical and less dissonant touches, that could be cuttingly poignant

It’s a gamble to cast a motionless dummy in a play about autonomy. The plot sends Annie through desolate encounters with cynical family and friends – a mother embittered by a lifetime of disappointment, an engaged friend hopeful that marriage will make life meaningful. Despite the inventiveness of lighting and video design, the plastic refuses to alchemise into something more stirring.

As a play about disconnection, Rescue Annie gets up real close. Whether ransacking the back catalogue of contemporary theatre (it puts headphones on our ears) or finding new inventions (there’s nifty facial-recognition technology), it pulls focus from Jones’s crystalline delivery, which is startlingly literate, deft at straight-faced punchlines, subtle in its foreshadowing.

Masterclass: A magnificent send-up of the anxieties of the age

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Brokentalkers: ‘Art often has this fascist set of ideas attached to it’

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Laethanta Sona/Happy Days: A daring, bold vision, brilliantly realised

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There is something less abstract in here: a psychological drama about an outbreak of isolation, made possible by sad inheritances. With more lyrical and less dissonant touches, that could be cuttingly poignant. It's a grim history of loneliness, regardless.

Runs at the Abbey Theatre until Saturday, September 18th, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival