Shard
Viking Theatre, Clontarf, Dublin
★★★★★
In the upstairs room of the Viking Theatre, Lankum’s stunning rendition of Go Dig My Grave plays in the darkness. It sets the tone: prophetic, mournful, inflected with dark Druidic power.
As the lights come on, a man stumbles on to the proscenium stage covered in dirt, a filthy keffiyeh hanging from his neck, and begins to devour tea and biscuits with guttural, almost animal sounds of pleasure. It’s immediately disturbing.
He looks like an Old Testament Job or a modern homeless man, someone to whom very bad things have happened. From the first second of his performance as Spooner, Neill Fleming is utterly compelling, and actually evokes real fear.
Whatever studies or footage he drew on to create these mannerisms – victims of MKUltra, dementia patients, war veterans – they tug at the darkest parts of the human psyche. His abrupt emotional shifts from apparent normalcy to some extreme state evoke a shattered mind.
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What follows is Spooner’s attempt to explain how he arrived in this state. “I started to think differently about the world in 2018,” he says, and from here unfolds Stewart Roche’s intricate, intellectually daring tale for our confused and troubling times.
Spooner was once a finance worker in Dublin, stepping over homeless people on his commute, his soul withering under the jargon, the meaningless bureaucracy, the sickening managerial euphemisms. More than anything, you sense Spooner’s yearning for some bigger piece of reality, to be plugged back into some mainframe of meaning and purpose.
Lonely and untethered, he drifts on to Reddit and 4chan, searching for answers and finding communities that resonate with his revelation about the true nature of society: “There is a blood lust beneath the surface of most people.” The play understands something very real and specifically modern: a nocturnal, insectile, paranoid mindset that breeds online.
That suspicion finds human form in Kemp, a brilliantly drawn cult leader somewhere between Charles Manson and Osho. Kemp recruits Spooner into an experiment in communal living on a remote island, inspired by John Lennon’s Dorinish. For €20,000 and the surrender of his phone, Spooner joins 40 others preparing to cross into a new life.
The island sequences are the play at its most dreamlike: manual labour, fireside songs, storytelling circles, a return to land and ritual. Yet the dream steadily darkens. “Have you ever been to one of those neighbourhood associations?” Spooner asks amiably before suddenly thundering, “There’s always one cunt.”
The lesson is that the commune becomes more and more like the corporate life he left behind, full of meaningless bureaucracy and petty factions.
Then the crops fail. Famine and drought creep in.
When they finally venture outside in search of help, they discover the towns eerily deserted, emptied of life, Spooner says, like the fake towns built on nuclear testing sites, and we begin to infer that some kind of plague or virus has swept through the country.
What makes Roche’s script so brilliant is the way it operates almost as allegory: beneath the outlines of recognisable contemporary events you feel the dark pressure of historical memory.
Lighting is minimalist and apocalyptic, and the sound design comes on spookily, like auditory hallucinations. The play is intellectually daring, surprising and at times genuinely funny.
Under Alan Smyth’s taut direction, the production never loses momentum, and Fleming’s performance is flawless.
Shard is at the Viking Theatre, Clontarf, Dublin, until Saturday, May 16th; then at Roundwood House, Co Laois, on Sunday, May 17th; James Joyce Centre, Dublin, on Tuesday, May 19th; and Midleton Arts Festival, Co Cork, on Wednesday, May 20th, and Saturday, May 23rd
