Speak Bitterness

Seven besuited actors stand behind a conference table littered with papers. They stare out at the audience conspiratorially, before reading out from this paper or that the confessions of their sins.

These sins - some terrible, some trivial, many thought-provoking - immediately engage the audience, who chortle along with the funnier ones and occasionally laugh mistakenly at the more serious. The seven intone their transgressions intimately, angrily - in a manner which is often at variance with their content - sometimes to each other, sometimes to themselves. But mostly to us.

Always prefixed "we", the confessions seem to implicate us all. While their random nature precludes exclusive identification with any one place, time or culture (references to freemarket economies, Eastern Europe and the first World War all put in an appearance), the predominant picture that emerges is of a modern generation, of a sniggering, self-satisfied Western society, without values, beliefs or faith, which prides itself on its tongue-in-cheek irony, its falseness and a so-called subversiveness which manifests itself in pranks played on friends, relatives and institutions.

Or, at least, that's how I saw it.

Maybe one should refrain from reading too much meaning into such a wide-ranging and open-ended piece; it is its very randomness that makes it so fascinating, embracing many possibilities of interpretation.

A bit on the long side, with too many references aimed at the MTV generation (there is a limit to how much significant trivia one can process in the one sitting), Speak Bitterness is still a thought-provoking and beautifully presented show by the Sheffield-based Forced Entertainment.

The Dublin International Theatre Symposium runs until Saturday. For information, see www.dublintheatre symposium.com