Oneday review: An absorbing experiment, both arch and obsessional

ONEDAY

Project Arts Centre
★ ★ ★ ★
What happened on March 13th, 2012? In an absorbing experiment, both arch and obsessional, the theatremaker Dick Walsh makes it his mission to know. "I'm like an actor who spent years studying Hamlet, except it's newspaper articles," says his onstage accomplice in digesting all available news stories, Shane Connolly, the most wired and rangy performer since Nicolas Cage.

Walsh has made fascinatingly weird shows before about how our world is mediated, but, directing this time with the comedian James Moran, he stealthily challenges the authority of journalism, theatre and expertise, more in sorrow than in anger. If you shouldn't believe everything you read, where does the truth reside?

Against Brian Walsh’s excellent jazz drumming, a nod to the then-fading Occupy movement, they revive a German pension squabble with a hysterical din, discuss the maddening ambiguities around a Syrian massacre or, conversely, deliver deadpan reportage of a US soldier’s killing spree with a frenzy of movement. Through it all Walsh nudges playfully and sincerely at the instability of conviction and certainty. All this happened, more or less.

Runs until Saturday, September 15th