A Delicate Balance

Review: If it were a movie, the soundtrack of Edward Albee's 1966 play would be Bob Dylan's song from the same era, Ballad of a Thin Man: "You know something is going on/ But you don't know what it is./ Do you Mister Jones?"

Like Dylan's song, the play arises from a time when the US ruling class was off-balance, when being rich seemed no longer quite the same thing as being powerful.

Its characters don't really know what's going on, and, Albee ensures, neither does its audience.

The family at the core of the play reeks of old money. Tobias pines for a time when the servants dealt with all his problems. His fierce wife, Agnes, clings desperately to the illusion that by keeping up the rules of taste and propriety she can control an anarchic world. Even Agnes's drunken, wilful sister, Claire, the family's unlicensed teller of truths, is convinced of her own innate superiority to the other alcoholics at her AA meetings. They are, in other words, people who have grown up to believe that their status will protect them from life's nameless calamities.

And yet they are adrift. They live, in a sense, in the aftermath of their own lives. Where Albee's previous masterpiece Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? allowed his characters to be lit up by the pyrotechnics of their passions, here all passion is spent. Tobias wanders around in a kind of daze, responding only to Agnes's commands. Agnes herself dreams of escaping into madness. Their daughter Julia is in perpetual flight from yet another failed marriage. Claire has long since taken refuge in alcohol. They are all as disengaged as an unplugged machine.

Into these emotional doldrums come Tobias and Agnes's best friends, Edna and Harry, fleeing from some mysterious terror that has suddenly engulfed them and demanding sanctuary. Agnes compares this unknowable fear to the plague, an image that links Albee's concerns with those of the French existentialist movement, from Artaud to Camus. What Albee is doing here, then, is something like what Harold Pinter was doing at the same time with the influence of Beckett: taking the philosophical absurdism of post-war France and domesticating it within the frame of Anglo-Saxon realism.

Albee once said that "every experience we have is both real and metaphor. I don't see why this shouldn't be true in art." This notion is at the heart of A Delicate Balance and provides the key to its successful presentation on stage. The audience has to accept what happens as both real and metaphorical, both credible and inexplicable. This, indeed, is the delicate balance of the title.

The great achievement of Caroline FitzGerald's terrific production at the Focus is that holds this balance beautifully. It is not, perhaps, as funny as the play ought to be, but it is otherwise almost perfectly poised. The cast is of one mind in understanding that the essential task is not to look for a passion that isn't there but to maintain the weird elegance that Albee puts in its place.

That elegance demands a unity of tone and purpose that could be destroyed by even a few false notes. The great pleasure of this production is the genuine sense of an ensemble with a shared feel for the reticence that allows the colourless, odourless terror to seep into all the gaps that Albee leaves for it.

The roles of Claire and Julia are the most conventionally dramatic, and Deirdre Donnelly and Elisabeth Moynihan are both superbly vivid. But the quieter roles are the toughest tests. Tobias moves in and out of focus, now a passive lapdog, now a kind of country club Lear, and Barry McGovern uses all the ability to be both blank and rhetorical that has made him a fine interpreter of Beckett. Ena May has a firm grasp on Agnes's stunned savagery, and Fedelma Cullen and Philip O'Sullivan have just the right mix of cartoonish absurdity and sinister threat for Edna and Harry.

This, then, is a rare delicacy that no one interested in a modern classic would want to resist.

Runs until April 20th. To book phone 01-6763071