Coming Up For The Third Time

It's fair to say that Flann O'Brien had the eloquence which comes with proximity to the Blarney stone, but whether he put it to good use depends on your stomach for his dalliences with the wilder streams of mid-20th century thought. Personally I can't get enough of that shit so this production, adapted from his novel by Jocelyn Clarke, was like strange manna from heaven.

A metaphysical police procedural which takes satiric swipes at metaphysics, the play centres around the theft of a very real black cashbox which becomes entwined with the theft of an imaginary bicycle and the competing claim of a stolen but equally fictive gold American watch.The main feature of the set is a huge open hardbacked book, which characters often circle manically, perhaps signifying the futility of quotidian striving. And the main character, played by the excellent and memorious Kellie Hughes, certainly falls into the category of the bemused and bedraggled hero, battered by absurdity on all sides.

What is the significance of her meeting her doppleganger, identically dressed as Chaplin's tramp and with the same wooden leg, but a tough thief feared throughout the land? Whither the local policeman who tries to explain relativity whilst monitoring how many of the citizens under his charge are hybridizing into bicycles themselves? Is he right to posit that the main character's lack of a name calls her very existence into question? And is the entire play a kind of halfway house, a purgatorial space for Kellie's nameless character who, as we know from the very first line, is a murderer?

This play will perplex some with its willful obscurity and delight others with its machine-gun surrealism and obvious relish of language - but at the same time it can also be seen as a satire on the very notion of 'Irish eloquence' ; the most touching lines are the simplest. Is it about a bicycle? No.