Decked

Theatre Upstairs @ The Plough, Dublin

In the inaugural production of this snug new venue, a man who has made and lost a mint during the fateful span of the property market finally hits the roof. Indeed, climbing out past set designer Paul Tristram’s compact but realistic array of slates and a chimney, in a state of high agitation, Ciaran Kenny’s Gerry turns himself into the embodiment of the housing crisis. Given that his once-successful business was in laminate flooring, and that he has brought a handgun for company, this location signals a complete reversal of fortunes.

Paul Walker’s short play is so clearly positioned as a zeitgeist tragedy that most people will make an educated guess as to how things went belly up. Gerry, however, is in no hurry: he begins at the beginning and his monologue, pitched somewhere between stream of consciousness oration and (as he describes it) salesman pitter-patter, remains slavish to chronology.

Despite his side-clutching discomfort, there’s little urgency in the telling and, frustratingly, Walker’s direction doesn’t hint at what compels him to speak or who he’s addressing.

Himself? His wife? Us? With neat symmetry, Gerry recalls the last recession, finding the love of his life, Kelli, as a teenager then proceeding to wind his way through the dole queues and smog of Dublin, to the building sites of London and back through a morass of vaguely dodgy dealing and long-held rivalries to a newly prosperous Ireland.

So far, so standard, and in grafting a personal narrative to a national drama, Walker must either make his everyman significant or find a new way to tell an unsurprising story.

As it is, though, the device is just as familiar, Gerry’s words as brisk and elliptical as an early Mark O’Rowe monologue, with a similar penchant for describing characters only by soubriquets: his rival Horse, for instance, or, more egregiously, his adulterous secretary known only as “The Pout”. He also tends to pursue every stray sexual thought, even at implausible times, a stream of consciousness cliché that threatens to make him seem either inarticulate or banal.

Walker is more successful at tracing the minor key, moving tragedy of a failing relationship and a stalling sex life, adding tidy character details that foreshadow a corrupt economy and its looming decline.

Sadly that doesn’t seem to satisfy his tragic arc and instead we conclude with large, horrific and rather rootless gestures, described with such spluttering urgency by a pained Kenny that they become more confusing than shocking.

Such overkill might work within a mythic framework but it seems misplaced in a stream of consciousness confession (Medea can get away with things that Molly Bloom cannot) and rather than jolt us, the dénouement feels like a loss of nerve. Walker sees nowhere for his roof-bound character to go, and while escape does seem impossible, this recession-era tragedy might gain impact if he could somehow talk him down. Runs daily at 1.10pm until Feb 13th