Tina's Idea of Fun
Peacock Theatre, Dublin 
★★

Sean P Summers’s new play for the Abbey begins with an artistic predicament. Aaron (Scott Graham), a teenager with a talent for graffiti, accepts a €15 commission to draw a picture of Charleville Mall, the home of his republican neighbour turned patron, Paddy (Andrew Connolly). Aaron will base it on a photograph, “so I can draw it exactly righ’”. But his efforts are interrupted by his mother, Tina (Hilda Fay), a recovering addict who despises Paddy, and instead he paints “junkie zombies comin’ out of the canal”. A similar dilemma faces Summers’s depiction of contemporary working-class Dublin: whether to create something painstakingly realistic or something completely monstrous?

Unconvincingly, this play attempts a bit of both. Set in Dublin’s North Strand in 2011, in tangled anticipation of Queen Elizabeth’s visit, it mingles scenes of light social realism with a much more ghastly comedy, and director Conall Morrison’s production doesn’t seem sure whether to treat it all as a political allegory or a carnival.

For instance, Paddy, an aggrieved republican, is meant to be a conspicuous oddball, someone the kids enjoy winding up, and about whom Tina can make infinitely darker insinuations, but the Paddy we see is earnest and harmless. This makes for the loosest possible revenge comedy, where a cackling Tina and her friend Edel (Sarah Morris) conspire to lure Paddy to a post-protest party where they will serve him sandwiches filled with dog excrement.

Scatological retribution is where most people will give up on Tina (an otherwise solid portrayal by Hilda Fay), but sadly nothing else of consequence happens. In one funny exchange between Tina and her mother, Fran (Ruth Hegarty), it is decided that Tina’s shortcomings are nothing compared with those of somebody called Joanne. Tina’s idea of fun, like everybody here, is to have someone to look down on. That raises an uncomfortable question about the play as to who is gawping at whom, and why.

It eventually features a daftly implausible reconciliation between two bitter antagonists, which may be the last word on the queen’s postcolonial visit. But, tellingly, we never see Aaron’s commissioned landscape, stranded somewhere between a fair likeness and a ludicrous distortion.

• Until May 14th