Elysium Nevada
Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
“Sunlight! They’re trying to kill us with sunlight!” So begins Barry McKinley’s Elysium Nevada, revived at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre in a production that demonstrates how much can be achieved with very limited means.
Running a tight 50 minutes, this dialogue-driven play has a Beckettian simplicity: three characters spend the entire time confined to wheelchairs in front of a painted desert backdrop of blue sky, rocks and a cactus.
There is very little movement, and only modest technical resources, but Liam Halligan’s subtle directorial choices are consistently effective, while Colm Maher’s lighting design evokes the brutality of the desert sun and expertly marks the play’s shifts in mood.
Set in a retirement home on the edge of the Mojave Desert, the bulk of the play consists of Bob (Michael James Ford) and Mike (Mark O’Regan) reminiscing about the good old days while Constance (Bairbre Ní Chaoimh) snoozes beside them, occasionally waking to wheeze into an oxygen mask.
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The script is wickedly funny, and the actors deliver it well, with impeccable timing and drawling American accents.
Bob and Mike are morally dubious, lecherous old men bickering as they wait for the reaper. The jokes come thick and fast, with cracks about ageing, society collapsing and children abandoning their parents to die in a hellscape.
There is old-crone contempt for the modern United States: “My kid has a treadmill in his basement. He runs for hours and goes nowhere.” There’s a great gag about the lifetime warranty on their wheelchairs – “What is that for us, three weeks?” – and fantasies about a better retirement home populated by “young women, 60, 65 tops. Women with bodies on them.” Bob reminisces wistfully about the strippers of his youth. “Where are they now?” he asks. “They’re probably here,” Mike replies.
Throughout these conversations they remain delightfully deluded, convinced they’re the last true gentlemen in the US, the only ones who still understand old-fashioned values such as manners and respect.
Elysium Nevada would be pleasing enough as a sharply written comedy. But something melancholic and menacing is happening under the surface. McKinley has a feeling for the poetry of mid-century Americana: casinos in Vegas, Cadillacs and martinis, suburban houses with stone sundials and white picket fences, wisteria climbing window frames, basketball hoops beside the garage.
Certain lines carry an understated mournfulness: “I used to have embossed business cards”; “Sally was a pretty girl. She wore calico dresses with flowers on them.”
These images circle a mystery. Some psychic wound looms in the background. Again and again the spectre of the atom bomb surfaces, like a discordant piano note. Oppenheimer appears to complain about his barbecued chicken. A sandstorm approaches. Memories decompose. The horror buried within the American project can’t be ignored.
A final twist is genuinely surprising, arriving in the play’s last 10 minutes and transforming it into something deeper and truer.
Elysium Nevada is at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, May 30th
