THEATRE REVIEW: THE NEW ELECTRIC BALLROOM
10 Oct'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3 out of 5

Consider it an Irish version of LOVE, LOSS AND WHAT I WORE, with just a touch of Gaelic madness thrown in — and not that silly treacle about little people and pots of gold, mind you, but the darker kind that speaks of banshees and madness in terms highly poetical.

It's called THE NEW ELECTRIC BALLROOM. Written by Enda Walsh, it opened in its Canadian premiere on the stage of the Tarragon Extra Space Friday, a production of MacKenzieRo: The Irish Repertory Company of Canada — a strange little piece of work, set in an all-but-derelict fishing village perched on the very edge of Ireland's nowhere.

Not that we get to see much of that village, for this is the story of three weird sisters who, for the most part, never leave their home. At least the eldest two —Breda, played by Rosemary Dunsmore and Clara, played by Sarah Dodd — don't. Instead, they spend their time reliving a watershed evening in their lives, an evening when they were as young as the world around them and they were filled with its promise — a single night when love and adventure and life itself seemed but a kiss away. It ended badly however and decades on, the tale of that evening has become a firmly entrenched part of family lore, played out over and over again, a catechism of love gone wrong used as both an entertainment and a cautionary tale to bind their younger sister Ada (Cathy Murphy) to them with bands of steel and fear.

Ada, for her part, manages to escape on a regular basis, employed as she is in the office of the local fish plant — and she's getting a trifle edgy. The sisters' lives are spiced, but only slightly, by the regular visits from Patsy, the local fish monger (played by Christopher Stanton), who arrives with every tide bearing not only whatever the sea has yielded up but news of the community around them, news which flows from him like an unfiltered artesian well. But even while she is addicted to her sisters' tales of romance and betrayal, Ada struggles against the tide of romantic recollections that wash over her, and under Breda's tutelage, she suddenly finds herself in the midst of a magical moment that will either free her from the familial lore or transform her into a part of it. For those familiar with the Irish canon, it will come as no surprise that this is a talky work, for all that the playwright often transforms that talk into breathtaking, poetic cascades that threaten to sweep you away.

And director Autumn Smith does her level best to stay afloat in that tide, enlisting the aid of designers Lindsay Anne Black (sets), Rosemary Umetsu (costumes), Laird Macdonald (lighting) and Stanton (who doubles as the sound designer). Together, they create a few moments of magic, but in the end, they are undone by the seemingly insurmountable unevenness in casting. While Dunsmore and Dodd both turn in carefully considered performances, the former all anger and angles, the latter all bewildered curves, Murphy is seemingly incapable of creating a character who can drive what action there is, neither threatening enough to explain the control she has over her siblings, nor manic enough to explain their need to keep her happy.

Happily, despite his fresh-scrubbed look, so totally at odds with Patsy as we should meet him, Stanton manages to rise above his physicality to create a few blissful moments — and while we welcome them, they are not, in the end, enough to make a night at THE NEW ELECTRIC BALLROOM either electric or a ball.