Infinity
Cork Arts Theatre
★★★★★
By introducing its Re:Directing programme of productions for 2026 with this presentation of Hannah Moscovitch’s examination of cosmic complexities, Cork Arts Theatre has scored a very palpable hit.
Infinity is both a title and a query: the perplexing issues of cosmic relativity are contained within a theatrical structure of episodes of scintillating dialogue. Even when the words thin to sadness they remain sequinned in a script infused with a poignant glitter.
It is not demeaning of the Canadian playwright’s earnest motivation to describe the humour of Infinity as hilarious. While never played for laughs, some passages have an oblique mischief that almost slides away from attention.
For the quickly responsive this is an alert: catch it while you can.
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An effort to find the gist of the plot is futile; there is no gist, as time just runs on as it will.
Elliot (Timmy Creed) is a gifted young physicist bewildered by his family’s inability to understand his obsessed search for the fundamental nature of time. Carmen (Martha Dunlea) is a gifted young violinist who sacrifices her symphony for Elliot’s doctorate. Sarah Jean (Bláithín Mac Gabhann) is their daughter, a gifted young mathematician who can’t get her sexual arithmetic to add up.
Mac Gabhann plays both adult and child. As an adult she has the assumed nonchalance of “go figure” normality. As a child she is a tornado.
The verbal dazzle of what are exchanges rather than conversations between three ill-adjusted personalities does not mask their very sharp edges. Julie Kelleher, the production’s director, has found the depth of voice beneath the human quandaries questioning existence. The scale here may be domestic, but its scope is space itself, a territory defying definition.
With a confident cast and clever crew, Kelleher finds the pulse of the writing, which flows backwards and forwards, pauses allowed like punctuation. String theory finds coherence; Einstein is dismissed; time flows inexorably in only one direction.
There is an unlikely beginning for Elliot and Carmen, and some of the language is both bald and ribald, but these three players have such an accuracy of tone and gesture that each significant element glances off its own meaning – as when, towards the end, Carmen flings out the word “furnace” where it is most inflammable or when Elliot reduces infinity to no more than an illusion.
Not illusory at all are a scene where the two parents try to have a row without waking the baby or an episode where Sarah Jean explodes in a tantrum of a velocity that only an eight-year-old can generate, after Elliot forgets to repair her alarm clock – the only time she knows.
It’s rarely enough that what is effectively a tragedy of life and intellect can be so generously funny.
Infinity is at Cork Arts Theatre until Saturday, February 14th
