Arlington [a love story]: easy to admire, hard to love

Enda Walsh's new play Arlington [a love story] starring Charlie Murphy, Hugh O'Connor and Oona Doherty at the Galway International Arts Festival, is hugely ambitious but gets overwhelmed by the task despite its impressive staging.

Despite staging his new play on an impressively big canvas - a vast bespoke stage in Leisureland no less - the sense of entrapment in Enda Walsh's latest production, Arlington [a love story], hasn't diminished. If anything, he's rendered the tragedy faced by the play's captors away from the normally private into something more pervasively sinister and societal. 

It opens with Charlie Murphy's character Isla, preparing for her release from an un-named tower. The sparse room, with its high window and bare furnishings comprising of three plastic chairs and an aquarium that repeatedly bursts into life, is under scrutiny from closed circuit cameras.

As she - literally - waits to see if her number is up, her fate in the uncertain world outside looks grim. When the curtain retracts, a control room is revealed, inside which lurks a jittery presence in the form of Hugh O'Connor. He's the detached voice communicating with Isla over the tannoy. Stuttering and uncertain, he's evidently a new figure in Isla's life - but as the pair trade conversation, a tenderness slowly develops. 

For those familiar with Walsh's work, the familiar tropes of confinement and sisyphean destiny are all here but the playwright is using them to address bigger themes as he grapples with everything from a dystopian future to the subjugation of human rights. Part JG Ballard, with a hint of Beckett, there's a frenzy to the storytelling that can often overwhelm the project. Despite the impressive staging (the projected visuals from the outside world on the stage work a treat), it can be a struggle to fully empathise with the characters who are more symbols than properly fleshed out individuals. O'Connor's ticks, in particular, quickly lose their charm.

While characters in an Enda Walsh play are as trapped by language as they are by circumstance - it's noteworthy that the most affecting moment is conducted in silence. A powerful but unsettling dance by Oona Doherty's character in the second act, choreographed by Emma Martin, leads up to a chilling climax.

The wordless performance, delivers more impact than the soliloquies and bursts of manic energy throughout and while the segment may try the audience's patience - it's worth mentioning that on the night I was there several people took their leave at this juncture - this scene is the one that lingers longest after the curtain has fallen.
 
Without the unsettling pay-off of, say BallyTurk or the humour of Bedbound, Arlington [a love story] - despite its lofty ambition - gets a bit lost in the task and although intriguing it's a production that's easy to admire but hard to love.

Arlington [a love story] runs at the Galway International Arts Festival until July 24.

John O'Driscoll @odriscollrte