The Head of Red O’Brien

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin Until Jan 29 1.10pm 15 (incl light lunch) bewleyscafetheatre.com 086-8784001

The monologue play goes in and out of fashion, but one of its saving graces is the immediate access it provides to a character’s thoughts, motivations, obsessions and self-deceptions. Writers of dialogue spend incalculable hours of hair-pulling effort trying to ration out such details through observation and elegant indication, but the monologue gets right into someone’s head.

In 2001, the writer Mark O’Halloran chose an even more direct route of accessing Red O’Brien’s mind; namely with a kitchen knife through the skull.

The medical science may have been inexact, but the artistic results of his wife's attack were divine. In Red O'Brien, O'Halloran created a middle-brow obsessive, a man who turned a fixation with The Hunt For Red October, among other things, into a religion, and whose enthusiasms were inflicted upon a disinterested wife in a passive-aggressive war of attrition.

An oddly beautiful, richly funny and lyrical piece, it is here revived by TrueWest Theatre with John O'Dowd in the role. But the bigger news is that the company will also premiere O'Halloran's companion piece, Mary Motorhead(starring Cora Fenton, pictured), immediately after to finally allow his long-suffering wife-turned-amateur- lobotomist her say. The pleasures of their innermost thoughts are this production's selling point.

But perhaps, one day, Red O’Brien and Mary Motorhead will finally start talking to each other.

Can't see that? Catch this

Celebrity, Project Arts Centre, Dublin