Today's review is of Play About My Dad at the  Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Play About My Dad

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

In recent years we have seen the emergence of what might be called reality theatre: shows in which the actor writes and presents his or her own experiences.

Hitherto, the form has been used to explore extraordinary events with an urgent public dimension.

George Seremba's Come Good Rain was about his own kidnap, torture and near-murder by the Obote regime in Uganda.

Gerard Mannix Flynn's James X drew on the official files that recorded his own abuse by the industrial school and criminal justice systems.

Michelle Read's performance of her own script Play About My Dad attempts something different. It raises the question of whether this kind of theatre can work when the experiences it draws on are purely private, when they carry no political charge.

And it suggests that the answer is probably "no".

Play About My Dad is, in truth, neither. It is not a play, in the sense that there is nothing at stake, nothing to play for. There is no dramatic tension, no revelation, no transformation. Photographs of her father, her mother and herself feature very heavily in the show, and the effect is in general less like that of going to the theatre and more like flicking through the family album of someone you barely know.

Nor is it really about her Dad, Barry Read, a panel-beater from Norwich who died of cancer in 1998. It is largely about herself: her memories of her father, her reactions to his death.

The man himself is evoked through words and pictures but scarcely emerges as a figure in his own right or as a compelling presence for those who never knew him.

The show has a kind of insistent intimacy. The Projects's Cube space is enfolded by screens on which the images appear.

The audience is arranged informally on makeshift benches. Read herself is there from the moment we enter, showing us to our seats, chatting, presiding. We are introduced to the crew. Read moves around during the performance, sitting among the audience, getting someone to pour her a cup of tea, embarrassing a few unfortunates into joining in one of her childhood games. Her tone is chummy, matey, sweetly congenial.

But all of this seems to substitute a personal for an artistic intimacy. Instead of making us care about herself and her father through language, insight, and expression, she seeks to make us care through friendship.

Because we like Michelle, we will like her Dad, and because we like him we will be as moved by his death as she is.

This isn't art, though, it's emotional blackmail.

The sweetly coercive nature of the whole thing extends even to telling us what we are to make of the show. Towards the end of the hour-long performance, Read asks, "Why am I doing this?" and wonders, "Is it my place to tell my family's story?"

This questioning would be more welcome if she didn't insist on telling us the right answers. No, it's not about pinning down her memories, and it's not about catharsis. It's a "marker" of her father's life and death. Why, though, does the marker have to be a public one?

Is the shattering experience of losing a parent not so profound precisely because it is so individual, because it hits at the core of one's inner self and is therefore unique and incommunicable?

With her background in stand-up comedy, Read has the ability to be completely in control of her audience, and she carries the whole thing off with a nerveless assurance.

That very control, though, narrows to almost nothing the free space between actor and audience in which there is enough air and light for real sympathy to blossom.