Pigeon

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

MASKS HAVE such a deep and wide history in the theatre, from the Greek chorus to Italian commedia dell’arte and Indian Kathakali, that they have come simply to represent the entire art form. Still, unless you count clowning, you rarely see them in action and the tradition seems more honoured than followed.

Ciarán Taylor’s new devised and wordless show for Carpet Theatre admirably tries to put mask performance at the service of contemporary social issues – the story concerns an out-of-work father, drowning in debt, and busying himself in shambolic DIY projects – while running hard against the masks’ expressive limits. On Alyson Cummins’s suburban living-room set, we get a bracing juxtaposition: nothing seems out of the ordinary but the scene is pointedly estranged. A man (Karl Quinn) streaks from his morning shower to catch the phone while his wife (Ruth Lehane) reunites their bed-headed son (Pau Cirer) with some carelessly placed shoes. It’s a modest family, but thanks to the elaborate constructions created by Cirer, they seem as big-headed as Easter Island statues.

These masks are impressively, carefully rendered. Quinn’s, for instance, has sad, soft eyes and deep lines, as though whittled into him with worry but it still allows him to suggest a range of emotions.

All masks are restrictive and the actors’ physical performance must compensate. Quinn and Lehane move with the precision of dancers, as husband engages in hand-to-handle combat with a bockety drawer overflowing with “final” notices, and his wife pursues a routine of domestic chores and impulse purchases (gender cliches, sadly, are not thoroughly interrogated).

It’s that discrepancy, between the broad and the precise, that clips Pigeon’s wings in other ways. The performers work hard to establish characters and situations, but in a piece about miscommunication and memory, Taylor struggles to advance the plot or summon emotional nuance, preferring accelerated motion and comic catastrophes over prolonged music loops from Jack Cawley, Mischa O’Mahony and Steve Wickham. Some of these are quite beautiful – a veil of crêpe paper under Sarah Jane Shiels’s dreamy lights conjures up a wedding ceremony from long ago – but others are just confusing: is the blonde who appears in flashbacks their daughter? Why does she disappear? Although masks encourage and emphasise exaggeration – Quinn festooning the house in special-offer flyers, or smuggling bills behind the walls – the show’s theme is painfully, personally real. For all the comic business there is a more gentle sadness that the masks only hint at: characters unable to talk to one another, who nonetheless put their best face forward.

Runs until June 2nd