Request Programme

The Elysian, Cork

It's always a pleasure to be in the same space as Eileen Walsh, even when, as in Request Programme, she's using the toilet. The space is a sky-high apartment in Cork's Elysian building. The irony of the location is implied by setting Corcadorca's production in an environment of hostile sterility, even though the audience walks to the site through tree-lined paths rimmed with waterfalls.

These are anything but Elysian fields; deliberately blocking out the light and the views from huge windows Walsh’s character remains anonymous and almost automated in her end-of-day ritual. There are clues: she is compulsively clean, a trait that suits her environment; she makes a sandwich with obsessive care, yet can’t eat it. Everything around her is efficient, sliding silently open or gliding closed just as she passes from channel to channel on the plasma television.

Apart from her own small sounds there is no noise, no words because there is no-one to speak to and the mobile phone, carried hopefully through the flat, never rings. Designer Paul Keogan has kept his fittings and fabrics neutral for this “show apartment”, endowing Walsh’s single splash of embroidered colour with the significance of shock.

Absence has more meaning here than presences (including our own – as a limited and often uncomfortable group, we learn what it is to be invisible): everything can be packed away, there are few photographs, the dimensions of the meagre rooms are tightly specific of usage in a unit designed for existence but not for living. As director of this exercise in quiet desperation by Franz Xaver Kroetz (translated by Katharina Hehn) Pat Kiernan's polemic has the luck of real time coincidence; the radio news tells of default insurances and Nama, John Creedon's shuffle includes The Nicest Little Girl in the Worldall buttressing the power of a performance which suggests that a life is less worth living when it is lived alone.

With Cork Midsummer Festival to July 7th