A comic face-off between a policeman and the bystander he accidentally shot in the hip during a drugs bust: it should be a grand set-up for Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe’s characteristic black humour and eventually it is, though there’s too much set-up and not enough showdown. This is not especially plot-driven comedy; events gently lever the characters (bitterly disgruntled victim Paul, trigger-happy Willy, Paul’s neurotic wife Adele, his sister-in-law Liz and his dog-loving mistress Theresa) into off-beam situations where their irrational perspectives can jostle against each other. Mildly lunatic monologues like the one that opens the play – where Liz discovers in the paper that dogs are incapable of love, and decides it’s her duty to inform Theresa that her mutt is pulling ‘the black trick’ on her – call for a quirky depth in the acting which Susan Bracken’s Liz does provide. But the other performances are a shade too naturalistic for fun, even though they are impressively detailed.
There’s some imaginative direction from Aileen Gonsalves, who ratchets up the comic tension by making the scene-changes mini parodies of the classic Western shoot-out, with the hapless heroes frozen in gun-slinging stances as their respective suburban sitting rooms settle around them. When Willy and Paul’s showdown eventually comes it hits the bullseye; it’s wince-making and off-the-wall. But the long first act fires too many blanks: it wants pace and bite – elements which O’Rowe’s plot doesn’t always deliver. And the characters (high on odd outlooks and farcical relationships, but low on depth) can’t really compensate. But its flaws are far from fatal: this is smart, screwy, and very agreeable entertainment.
