If Gerry Springer and his human rarities or the Enron debacle can become operas, if a Swedish pop quintet can become a blockbuster film, if an Irish soccer squad captain can score in a musical, then one of poetry’s most notable creations, T.S.Eliot’s wonderfully befuddled J.Alfred Prufrock, should be able to tread the boards too. WATERDONKEY Theatre fiddle with this anti-hero’s disjointed and de-humanised world for their latest production Love Song, but despite its worthily artistic intentions, it rather malingers, is a bit obtuse, “and, at times, indeed, ridiculous.”

Twenty or thirty years after a Leaving Certificate exam, balding men can still recite Eliot’s pungent, symbolist lines. At the butt-end of a day, they too can note how their hair is growing thin, ponder the un-asked questions, resent moments that were never forced to a crisis or the fact that their lives were measured out with coffee spoons. Eliot’s lyrically grubby poem, with its fractured verse, unsettling images and scholarly allusion tracks the wandering thoughts of early twentieth-century Everyman as he puzzles and procrastinates in an ugly new era. Shocking, too, that such a prescient, modern-seeming poem is a century old this year.

This Hamlet-echoing dramatic monologue, then, is the artistic source for WATERDONKEY’s Love Song and their work is an impression, perhaps, rather than a slavish adaptation of the poem. The Galway company’s Prufrock is haunted by incarnations from his imagination and the ensuing happenings draw on some of the themes and the literary style of the work. True to the dream-like, alienating and suffocating world of Eliot’s central protagonist, five characters (including a Prufrock/Eliot figure) refuse to communicate with each other; they blurt snatches of song and dialogue, repeat movements, gestures and sounds of little explicit meaning in a staged ‘stream of consciousness’. Smatterings of humour (where Juliet must coach Romeo in his lines) briefly emerge, periods of yogic meditation interrupt action, prosaic language is used to articulate profound feelings, and energetic dance sets punctuate newly devised monologue.

There are a few problems though. On the page, a beautifully crafted text can be ambiguous, but read and re-read, it is eventually pieced together to a reader’s satisfaction. Of course, a work in any medium doesn’t really need to be ‘understood’ to be alluring. However, during the brief passage of this play, fragmentation and disjointedness on stage confuse because an audience has only one short stab at ‘getting’ it. Then this particular production’s lack of conflict, void of heightened emotion and the dearth of either narrative or other cohesive devices don’t really help either. The show’s general absence of ‘drama’ is exacerbated by the un-developed nature of the direction (the programme lists no director) and also by some enthusiastic but rather imprecise and unconvincing dance choreography, and some half-hearted mime. In short, a work can be subtle, obscure or even unintelligible, but the more this is the case, the more important it is executed well.

In the end, this work sets out to explore the difficulty of honest communication but ends up finding it difficult to communicate. Love Song is a fairly novel concept piece that celebrates a degree of theatrical invention and creative courage, references a monumental text, but ultimately its rather “high sentence” seems self-indulgent.