Bedbound

The New Theatre, Dublin

Looking back on Enda Walsh’s contained and frantic work from 2000, it’s hard to decide whether it was a dark and twisted fantasy or an uncannily prescient warning sign. The tale of a furniture salesman, Maxie Darcy, and his polio-stricken daughter, is a rags to riches to shreds story, in which Maxie’s resistible rise has the giddying and brutal excess of the Tiger years while Walsh’s blistering, logorrhoeic style anticipates the hysteria beneath that smooth national narrative.

New company Pillow Talk respond imaginatively to Walsh’s play, stimulated more by its surreal display than its nightmarish significance. Zia Holly’s set, for instance, trades the imprisoning crate of Walsh’s script for a more striking self-assembly: a frozen cyclone of furniture, climbing and curling around the characters. Director Rosemary McKenna takes that as licence to further distend the realism of the characters, which gives a runaway momentum but which often forces her to slams the brakes.

As Maxie, Cork’s would-be furniture kingpin of blunt ambition and violent appetite, Fionn Ó Loinsigh makes a surprising entrance and sustains its relentless energy without following a precise physicality. (While words run wild in Walsh, movement needs to as deliberate as dance.) Similarly, Sara Joyce brings compelling focus and versatility to his daughter, the multi-role-playing support player in Maxie’s reconstruction of the past, yet her paralysis barely registers. Instead, confine- ment is existential, expressed as a life propped up daily by a chaotic story: “The words line up and use my mouth as a cliff edge.” With costumes and make-up erring on the side of ghoulishness, the production threatens to plunge into grotesquery. Sensing that risk, McKenna will slow the pace to a near stop, magnifying discomfort or underlining portent, and often the gears seem to grind. You don’t need to have walked past another bust furniture shop to see Maxie’s story of European brown-nosing, hubristic expansion and calamitous retraction as a metaphor for the nation. But in treating the play as a lurid fairytale, Pillow Talk are keener to explore both the succour and suffocation of the stories we tell ourselves. “What am I if I am not my words?” asks Joyce’s tangled daughter. This solid, timely revival knows there’s still plenty to say on the subject.

Runs until September 10