Plasticine

The Savoy Theatre, Cork

Vast, forbidding, full of action but ultimately short of opportunities, the bleakly imagined Russia of Vassily Sigarev’s 2002 play bears just a passing resemblance to the Savoy Theatre, the venue for Corcadorca’s new promenade production. Given an extra seediness appropriate to Sigarev’s anonymous city in the Urals, the venue accommodates a bedroom, school urinals, a cinema, a wedding and the various sites of degradation that troubled teenager Maksim (Caoilfhionn Dunne) trudges around.

As the audience dutifully follows him up and down stairs, Pat Kiernan’s production seems to expose both the sour logic of Sigarev’s drama and the limits of promenade performance in confined spaces at the same time: for all the commitment of the production’s large cast, the detail of its design or the constant motion of its scenes, it quickly feels that there is nowhere to go.

We begin, for instance, with an ending, where the first sight is one of Maksim’s schoolfriends, Spira, hanging lifelessly from the rafters – a stage embellishment of Kiernan’s for a character who routinely appears to tempt Maksim into the great beyond. Sigarev’s play suggests neither a character nor a society with much to live for.

Maksim is hounded by a schoolteacher whose nephew he once humiliated, he is then expelled for a juvenile stunt while his friend, Lyokha, is spared by a petty bribe, and he is bruised along an episodic and brutal journey by almost everyone he encounters.

It’s unclear whether to take this as a grim slice of post-Soviet realism or the hopeless magnification of a dystopic fantasy. Kiernan’s production nudges at both possibilities: characters move through the audience naturally, occasionally glimpsed through grainy CCTV images, but Maree Kearns’s design of impossibly angled beds, amusingly retracting urinals and hellish cages suggests something darkly surreal. So does the casting of Caoilfhionn Dunne as the sullen antihero, a bold example of cross-gender casting which is downplayed in performance. Her Maksim is surly and aggressive, yet quietly creative, obsessively making plasticine models and moulds that the play’s progression contorts into ever more worrying shapes.

Sexuality is no less malleable in a play where Maksim and Conor McNeill’s engagingly performed Lyokha get hot and heavy together watching a wittily edited Caligula, while Maksim pines for Jane Deasy’s unattainable “Her”.

More disturbingly, though, the kids are buffeted by a series of mauling prostitutes and, in the production’s most egregiously extended scene, brutally raped by a pair of thugs while a Shostakovich Waltz plays on. It’s the music cue – a glib juxtaposition – rather than Conor Madden and Mark D’Aughton’s commandingly horrifying performances, that compromises the scene for shock value.

The play’s real jolt comes when a stranger offers Maksim a biscuit. “What for?” he barks, unaccustomed to kindness. Such counterbalances are rare in a world of suffocating horror, but without them we also become inured to the constant degradation. The production is a carefully considered promenade through Hades, disturbing to move through, but one you can just as easily walk away from.

Runs until June 26th