Arid territory for the dramatic

Theatre for its own sake, in which there is no narrative connection between events, intellect or emotions, tends to prove fairly arid territory for drama. Such was the case last night when Bedrock Theatre, in the second week of its season of "theatric of cruelty", offered Waterfront Wasteland Medea Material Landscape with Argonauts (a kind of psuedo-simultaneous triplet of fragments by Marc von Heiner Muller) and demonstrated proficiently why so much work inspired by Antonin Artoud's theatrical philosophy ends in a dramatic cul de sac.

Finely and firmly directed by Jason Byrne, it is played with confidence, commitment and assurance by Andrew Bennett, Lesley Conroy, Mark D'Aughton, Debbie Leeding and Karl Shiels.

Voices are deliberately pitched in an emotionless monotone and the pacing is carefully slow, as if the frequently violent words of themselves carried a meaning not in need of theatrical interpretation. There is an arrogance in this, an implicit demand that the audience struggle to engage? itself with what is going on rather than being invited or enticed to join, emotionally or intellectually, with what is on stage. The struggle offers no dramatic return.

The second piece is Fork, a new work written and directed by Gavin Kostick, and the humour evident for about one third of its length suggests that there might be an effort to satirise the work that went before.

This is an odd mixture of Celtic and contemporary myth, conceivably (but not persuasively) derived from Greek origins. It concerns an Ulster newspaper boy who kills a copulating snake and is turned into a woman who becomes a hermaphrodite when eventually she kills the second snake of the pair.

Less precisely directed than the first work, and less assuredly acted, it finally subsides into a welter of banal words and stalls in another undramatic cul de sac. All in all, this was not too rewarding a night of theatre.