The New Electric Ballroom

The waves crash on, drowning out the music which marks the opening moments of Enda Walsh's The New Electric Ballroom. Two elderly sisters play out the shag end of sibling rivalries and unspoken disappointed affection whilst reliving their teenage experiences of romance for the dubious benefit of Ada (Catherine Walsh).

Breda (Rosaleen Linehan) and Clara (Val Lilley) inhabit a world of their own partial (in both senses) fantasies, in which the charms of the New Electric Ballroom of over forty years ago are as fresh as Ada's baking. Into this maelstrom of pretence, Patsy (Mickel Murfi), the local fishmonger increasingly intrudes, producing crisis and its uncomfortable resolution.

Any members of the audience familiar with either Walsh's previous, and highly successful play The Walworth Farce, or Tom Murphy's classic, Baligangaire, will recognise the ritual struggle to assert the truth, the denial of same, and the ways in which characters become trapped by repetition and re-avowal, and the ways we all use language to protect ourselves and entrap others. Compared to Walsh's earlier work, however, this is both a gentler yet in some ways more obvious re-working of these themes.

The cast are absolutely splendid, rising to the many opportunities the script affords them to demonstrate their considerable skills. And yet, and yet, one sometimes wishes Walsh could find ways out of the rooms he so consistently imprisons his characters in. To suggest alternative approaches to a genuinely creative mind is to court the deserved result of hubris, but it would be interesting, after watching so many characters' attempts to break out of their environments, to watch one trying to break in.

It's the seemingly inevitable fate of those who create to become the prisoners of the expectations their work creates. Experiment, far less escape, becomes difficult; for some impossible. Walsh has skilfully delineated and described the ways in which we can become entrapped and often entrap ourselves - perhaps what's now needed is some equally shrewd looks at other aspects of the prisoner's dilemma.

Times: August 3-16 (times vary, see Fringe Programme)
Copyright Bill Dunlop 2008. Published on edinburghguide.com August 2008