Neil LaBute's popularity in the Irish theatre, which culminates with the world premiere of his new play, Wrecks, as part of Cork 2005, is easily explained, writes Fintan O'Toole.
In spite of his Hollywood credentials and harsh, almost misanthropic vision, he is essentially an old-fashioned literary playwright whose work sits easily alongside that of, say, Conor McPherson or Mark O'Rowe. His plays are driven by a sensitivity to verbal language on the one side and an almost obsessive concern for plot on the other. The former is his great strength, the latter a fatal temptation, and both are fully expressed in Wrecks.
With one actor and a playing time of 65 minutes, Wrecks is not a major work. Neither, for LaBute, is it a big departure. Wrecks is, in fact, strikingly reminiscent of an earlier play, Medea Redux, which formed part of the bash trilogy. Each is a monologue performed initially by a screen star - Calista Flockhart in Medea Redux, the brilliant Ed Harris in Wrecks. Each is narrated by a compulsive smoker who disavows a capacity for eloquence: Flockhart's character began by making it clear that "I was never this major talker or anything", while Harris warns us that "I don't have a touch of the poet in me". Each is governed by Greek myth - in the case of Wrecks, the punning title gives us a none too subtle hint of what the final plot twist will be.
That obedience to a mythic story is in fact one of the inherent weaknesses of the monologue form. In the absence of drama, the difficulty of finding an ending with sufficient impact encourages a leap into sensationalism. Here, the crudeness of the plotting is somewhat offset by the fact that its very predictability allows you to discount it in advance and concentrate on Harris's marvellous capacity to inhabit LaBute's beautifully spare and elegantly constructed syntax. Though he hasn't appeared on stage for almost a decade, Harris has the complete control that makes you trust him implicitly before he even opens his mouth.
We meet Harris's Ed Carr in a funeral home, beside his wife's coffin, and are to understand that, while he talks confidentially to us, his more restrained public self is greeting the mourners. Harris has the complex, apparently contradictory presence that makes an actor a star. The chiselled, Mount Rushmore features and the hard, sceptical eye he turns on the audience make him completely convincing as a Midwestern, middle-aged man who has made money in the car-hire business after a childhood in orphanages and a spell in the navy in Vietnam. But he also holds himself with a wiry dignity and moves with an easy grace. You believe his nostalgia for the kind of manliness that he defines by "chivalry and proper thoughts and holding a door open for a lady". And you buy the image of his marriage he wants to sell: his complete, tender, all-encompassing devotion to the wife he met when she was 40 and he was 25.
LaBute, who also directs, gives him a nicely comic line in linguistic self-awareness, making him catch himself in the act of using words such as "indeed" and "appropriate" that do not feel at home in his mouth. Harris gets inside LaBute's language, capturing the reticence behind its revelations, revelling in the way it holds its shape even as it loops off into digressions about Shirley Temple's childhood, Oprah's use of words or the wonders of a 1961 Buick. He allows it to pick up the frequencies of a wider America that give latitude to the otherwise constrained form of a one-actor play.
The pity is that LaBute can't leave this elegant construction alone, or at least let its mythic resonances emerge with some sense of subtlety or ambiguity. As with much of his work, something makes him distrust his own capacity to create more open, lingering images, and he closes Wrecks down with a heavy-handed attempt at shock and awe. If he ever trusts himself enough to leave things unsaid, the feel for language and for acting that are so wonderfully evident here may make him great.
Runs until Dec 3
