Mouth to Mouth

Project Cube, Dublin

"LOOK AT US," commands one sour, self-obsessed character in Kevin Elyot's early 2001 drama; "conglomerations of meat and juices tarted up in Armani. And where do we all end up? In a mass of stinking putrefaction." There may be a shiver of recognition in the overwrought nihilism of the London bourgeoisie now that our own party of excess is over. But it's hard to find a more compelling reason behind Crooked House's staging of Mouth to Mouth.

Invoking both Proust (explicitly) and Pinter (more implicitly), Elyot's memory play moves backwards in time towards the source of his protagonist's guilt. We first find Nick Devlin's Frank, a playwright living with Aids and struggling with writer's block, in the kitchen of his friend's home, his circuitous chatter of his deterioration heavy with foreboding. Jillian Bradbury's Laura listens impassively and at one point the kitchen itself seems to judder with portent. At least it seems to know what's going on.

The play becomes less interesting the more it reveals, though, and while director Peter Hussey leads his cast through admirably restrained performances, even his economical production becomes overburdened with frequent set changes and a distractingly clunky sound design. The mechanics of the plot seem no more delicate: a tangle of lust and betrayals among self-described "classless snobs".

The most interesting of these is Laura's jealousy for her 15-year-old son's holiday romance, a tension that Ian Armstrong's Phillip implausibly tries to resolve by dancing with his mother, leading Bradbury's nicely poised Laura in an unsettlingly Oedipal tango. The most pivotal betrayal, though, is a remembered incident in which Frank dubiously resuscitated the young boy after a swimming mishap – a manoeuvre he now attempts on dry land. In the tragedy that follows, the kitchen is again asked to comment. It doesn't like it one bit.

As a meditation on the corrupting force of lust and social privilege, Elyot's play is slight enough, relying on misty symbol and aching self-reference to convey its meaning: the play itself stands as the confession its character cannot make. But that self-consciousness thwarts the more subtle efforts of the company, nowhere more so than in Sophia Cadogan's sincere performance of a character never allowed to be more than a blonde joke. As hard as Crooked House tries, the play resists attempts to breathe some life into it.

Runs until Sept 4th