Womb review: An old-school dystopian play with clear inspiration but misty results

Maud Hendricks's new play is set in Dublin 100 years from now, where a woman is granted asylum for being pregnant. Photo: Jeda de Brí

Samuel Beckett Theatre (Dance Studio), Dublin

Jan 14-19

★ ★ 

If someone asked one year ago to gauge the mood of society, you could simply point to the fiction bestsellers. Old releases like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984 were selling again, as if readers were seeing uncanny parallels between those novels’ oppressive societies and their own reality.

In Womb, Maud Hendricks’s well meaning but misty dystopian play for Outlandish Theatre Platform, there is a sense of something similar. Taking place in Dublin 100 years from now, it shows a totalitarian regime putting citizens in home sharing, and leaving women negotiating shelter in exchange for helping repopulate the species. It’s easy to see where the inspiration came from. 

The play seems to have interesting things to say, and chooses to do so with curiously old-school methods. In a room that, in Sabine Dargent’s costuming and Ger Clancy’s set design, is white and sterile as a spaceship, characters are stripped of personality and sent wandering through episodic scenes like automatons, as if written by a playwright nostalgic for old avant-garde theatre. It tips so steeply into absurdism, the play is difficult to judge even from early on, when a self-pitying Pigeon (Julia O’Loughlin Hendricks) with comedic woes joins a line-up of offhand complainants. (“Fuck the planet,” someone says, without explanation).

If at this point Hendricks’s production, co-directed by Bernie O’Reilly, is a mystery to people in the audience, and perhaps even to performers onstage, it’s possible only the redoubtable Venetia Bowe knows what’s happening. She arrives with intent and purpose as Alice, a pregnant woman granted asylum for becoming an “incubator” for a “lamb”. The safety of her pregnancy is promised by a prophet, who also foresees her leading a revolution. 

We follow Alice as she encounters a sinister gallery of characters played by James Hosty, from a bluff Plumber to an invasive Midwife. Along the way she has revelations about the law and nature, but these are written in indigestible chunks of dialogue. “Natural human processes have been dissected,” she observes, making the point less clear.

Many of the production’s decisions are difficult to fathom. Why is Hosty’s Prophet pivoting and extending like a dancer, while Alice details her backstory? Why does Ger Clancy’s set suspend a sealed bottle of water from on high, as the room drenches from a leak? The bigger question is the presence of the Goddess of Unrestrained Privilege, an omnipresent character whose part in the drama is left hanging. It may, finally, be a picture of new life and renewed affection for the natural world, but one that remains unfinished.