Theatre of the Absurd, is, well, absurd. If it’s not to your taste, no amount of stylistic flair on the part of the production team is going to convince you that your time and money has been well spent. If you’re keen to see what can be done with a text that has many tabula-rastic qualities, then Zoe Ní Riordáin and her team have done an admirable job of taking an infrequently-performed text, staging it capably, and performing it with strong technique, for an audience that apparently knew its way around a post-dramatic kind of frame.
 
That’s the impression this writer got, anyway, on the night of review. Upon entering Project Cube, one was greeted by a stage — superbly designed by Colm McNally — that was already inhabited by the characters. The Tutor (Daniel Reardon) was shuffling up and down stage right; The Pupil (Lisa Walsh) was practising her tennis moves stage left; and The Maid (Camille Lucy Ross) was bustling about upstage, the only one doing anything that seemed useful. There’s usually a hushed, and somewhat uncomfortable vibe in a space in which the actors are already acting, a cross between the silence you get in a church or a museum, and the tension you get when stuck in between stations on the Underground. There’s a discomfort that comes from enforced silence/intimacy: you’re all in it together, but you’d really rather be separate, thanks.
 
Not this crowd: they chatted away, completely comfortable with the fact that they were in a performance space in which performance was happening — not in the least bit disrespectful, but not cowed, either. They knew to stop laughing when the usual voice-over instructions were broadcast, and they exuded an air of confidence that speaks well to youthful Irish audiences. Have been they raised without a fourth wall? It appears that this may be so.
 
All of the above matters, because the production is predicated on the notion that the audience is going to fill in the blanks for itself, and this crowd was well able for it. Whether or not those blanks were worth filling in is another matter altogether. A maid prepares a room by arranging furniture and spreading white powder around, making the space look disused. A pupil insistently rings the doorbell, is admitted, and waits for the hesitant tutor. He quizzes her to assess her level of aptitude. When it becomes apparent that she can’t subtract, and is intractable about this failing, proceedings spiral out of control, only to start all over again at the end.
 
If you like your narrative arc to build up a release of emotion via personal identification with the subject at hand, then you will find yourself unsatisfied. That most of those in the room can be assumed to have gone to school, had to study, worried about their future, and struggled with new concepts would seem to be an audience tailor-made for such a catharsis. In Ionesco’s hands, the narrative doesn’t arc so much as lurch from set piece to set piece, so that whatever meaning one has made for oneself is swept away with the next beat.
 
There is a high level of self-possession evidenced in all aspects of the production, from that wonderfully designed set, through Sarah Jane Shiels' lighting design, and Jack Cawley's soundscape. Ní Riordáin sets a brisk pace and has imbued the swerving text with focus and creativity, asking the actors to use their bodies as much as their voices to convey the many shifts in tone. She sets Reardon and Walsh on a trajectory of change that they manage very well: Reardon morphs from uneasy, unwilling tutor to homicidal megalomaniac believably, and Walsh disintegrates from chipper know-it-all to toothachey victim with the same skill. All the while, Ross broods in the background, poised to sweep up after the Tutor and is, in fact, the one who has the power to stop it, once and for all. Even that insight hasn’t got time to take root, as it is has nowhere to go, textually, and the inevitably of the ending turning into another beginning seems basic absurdist fare.
 
It’s difficult to believe that Ionesco and Beckett have been sheltered under the same theatrical umbrella. Labellers gonna label, but comparing the two seems completely, well, absurd. It is perhaps one thing to comment on the meaninglessness of existence meaninglessly, and another to present it in all its thwarted, relatable struggle — a completely different kettle of carrots and turnips. With the latter, one comes away having experienced catharsis; in the former, you feel like you’ve made up a whole bunch of stories in your head, without any of them rendering any abiding emotional investment. This is arguably what Ionesco’s on about, and is seeking to question, i.e. is manufactured response authentic? My savvy audience members seemed happy enough to applaud enthusiastically and resume their happy chatter, and in a way perhaps proved Ionesco right: it all ends and begins and ends, ad infinitum.

Susan Conley is a cultural critic and author. Her latest book is That Magic Mischief (2013).