Review: New Electric Ballroom, Riverside Studios

Written for Culture Wars

In form, Enda Walsh’s latest is almost the exact mirror image of his previous play, The Walworth Farce. While the latter’s male household has been supplanted by a female one, there is the same claustrophobic inertia and the same enforced, inescapable and everlasting ritual, played out daily to its death. New Electric Ballroom, however, offers none of its predecessor’s hope: though it presents the same moment of choice – a beckoning crack of light from the outside world – opportunity slips away from its inmates, leaving them at the mercy of a hollow cycle of isolation.

Inside an Irish cannery, Ada, Breda and Clara whittle away the present by attempting to recapture the past. Broken only by the frequent intrusions of their fishmonger Patsy, the women repeat vast beat poems harking back to their youth and, specifically, The Roller Royle’s visit to the titular dancehall. Their relived traumas – like a tape stuck on regret – suggest a community ill-equipped to survive the invasion of glitzy Americana; a place best left to its own locality without the notion of elsewhere, of an unreachable “Wondrous Place”.

The combination of Walsh’s expressionistic text and the gentle disco glisten of Sabine Dargent’s industrial design create a dream-like quality that muddles with the strangely concrete setting. It is a real world, albeit one that seems controlled by a Beckettian puppet-master: sunsets fast-forward, time dissolves, nothing much happens.

Words and the act of speech take centre stage. Walsh’s characters vocalise only to fill the void of the immediate future. They are “people talking just for the act of it. Words spinning to nothing. For no definable reason.” Stuck limpet-like to the past, the women’s words become a vain search for catharsis, as if, somehow, this time around the ending might be different. For all their fixated repetition, however, history remains fixed.

As Ada, Catherine Walsh instils a huge intensity. She wields a lipstick at her elders as if it were a police baton, conducting the beautifully spoken, yet trembling, nostalgia of Ruth McCabe and Rosaleen Linehan. Mikel Murfi’s jittery Patsy, dragged in and dolled up in the shiniest of blue suits, is played to perfection. He cowers behind a babble of words, before affecting a startling transformation into the rock ‘n’ roll icon of their memories.

However, the superb quality of the performances and Walsh’s own spot-on direction cannot evade the fact that the play’s academic successes do not translate well into performance. The quirkfire density of the text, delivered in thick Irish accents, leave you straining to keep pace and snatching to comprehend. Moreover, the fiction finds itself in a constant battle with the reality of the theatrical event.

In both New Electric Ballroom and The Walworth Farce, knitted together like yin and yang, there is the most unexpected of comparisons: the work of Forced Entertainment. With its focus on the oddities of mimetic representation, The Walworth Farce resonates with the rushed chaos and crass costuming of The World in Pictures or Emanuelle Enchanted. New Electric Ballrom, in turn, shares its fascination for the conjuring power of words with Spectacular and, one presumes, the forthcoming Void Story. However, where Forced Entertainment have made an artform out of boredom, Walsh cannot grant the same level of permission to his audience. The fiction must hold our attention, rather than challenge us to keep watching, as do the reality-centred performances of Forced Entertainment. Walsh simply slips off the tightrope between postdramatic and undramatic too often.

It is a touching piece well-presented, but, for all its merits, New Electric Ballroom cannot escape the fact that it works better on the page than on the stage.