In the tiny Glass Mask cafe-theatre, Charlie (Lauren Farrell) tosses strips of raw offal into a bucket. A butcher who loves her job, Charlie is entertaining a potential boyfriend, the brash welder, Victor (Rex Ryan) in her white-tiled butcher’s shop, surrounded by meat flanks and an array of knives and cleavers. This bracingly unromantic scenario was created in 1972 by Bavarian playwright and actor, Franz Xaver Kroetz, in his play Männersache, which he later expanded into Through the Leaves.
In his new version, award-winning playwright Simon Stephens brings Kroetz’s stark play closer to the present day, with blasts of post-punk on the soundtrack but no mobile phones evident in Ross Gaynor’s production. Whether it is in the sharp blades displayed on the wall in Andrew Clancy’s arrestingly clinical design, or the boozy Victor’s hollow-eyed stare into the audience, a threat of violence hovers from the start.
Long silences between Charlie and Victor create a sense of their disconnection, just as much as their awkward, unsensual sex scenes, which occur so often that the production’s intimacy coordinator Marty Breen deserves to share directing credits. In portraying this off-kilter relationship that seems the antithesis of love, Ryan and Farrell give hugely committed performances, with Farrell’s Charlie compellingly pathetic in her attempts to placate and hold on to someone who constantly insults and demeans her.
With both characters deliberately presented as emblematic “types” rather than fleshed-out characters, their destructive co-dependence seems timeless, as though Strindberg has been filtered through a radical 1970s German experiment. Victor’s emotionally locked-in behaviour seems to suggest that whatever happens between them will have an edge of cruelty. “I want to destroy you, mentally,” he tells her. Any affection on display is from the lonely Charlie towards her dog, an attachment misinterpreted by Victor.
With cumbersome scene-changes, Gaynor’s direction does not always sustain the sense of bleak brutality required by Kroetz’s and Stephens’ text. Yet the intimate venue successfully provides built-in claustrophobia, through proximity to the performers. When this production works best it has a comically absurdist tone, tilting into nihilism so extreme it has its own bizarre logic.
• At Glass Mask theatre, Dublin, until 1 March; then at Finborough theatre, London, 18 March to 12 April.
