My Best Friend Drowned in a Swimming Pool

The Cube, Project Arts Centre, Dublin

When four “friends” attempt to cope with their best friend’s death after he cracks his head on a concrete sculpture and drowns in a swimming pool at a party, everything is amplified: the retorts, the incessant smoking, the unnecessary screaming that permeates a scene too many. These are five kids (four, plus the real ghost of Henry), negotiating their relationships as damaged frenemies, suspicious and critical of each other yet inescapably bound by their shared tragedy.

Written by Eva O’Connor, who stars as Eleanor, the melodrama is at times suffocating, as they bitch, criticise each other’s coping mechanisms and behaviour, and display a remarkable lack of compassion for their collective suffering. My Best Friend Drowned . . . inhabits a teenage universe where any lightheartedness of youth has been dunked in death leaving little warmth.

The characters speak in intense and shouty bursts, too shouty perhaps, although a particularly skittery group of teenagers in the audience might have caused the cast to up the volume slightly. This volume means that some of the excellently vitriolic and tart lines throughout miss their marks, as slut-shaming, drug-taking and bullying phone calls fill the dark void that tragedy opens up.

O’Connor performs a defensive balance of a young woman who shrouds her vulnerability in taut viciousness expertly, but Liam’s (Ruairi O’Shea) interactions with his friends as a young gay man who subscribes to an extremely priestly version of Catholicism are at times superfluous, and often clunky – the rosary beads around his neck act like a noose on the believability of his character.

For all the barrages of conversation, it’s when voices fall mute that depth emerges, with O’Connor’s mesmerising dance pieces diverting the audience from feeling as though we’re being let in on an acting workshop for a particularly melodramatic and bleak episode of Skins.

Ends tomorrow