Citysong review: Wordy play about a Dublin family misses its tragicomic notes

Dublin is a record in Dylan Coburn Gray's new play, and time jumps like a needle skipping backwards. Photo: Ros Kavanagh 

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

★ ★

“The Spire is a spindle,” says someone early in Citysong, as if the Dublin monument could set something spinning. It’s difficult not to admire the imaginative conceit of Dylan Coburn Gray’s new play: the city is a “record of all that has happened to us, is happening, or will”.

If the metaphor is phonographic, then the play has fun with its own breaks and scratches. It begins with a taxi driver, studying his aged reflection in a rear-view mirror, before dutifully picking up his drunken and gleeful daughter. The characters and plot seem to be coming into view when a sudden jolt, like a needle skipping backwards, sends us instead to catch up with two passengers - Kate (Jade Jordan) and Rob (Daryl McCormack) - who were passionately kissing in the back seat. You could have sworn they were only passing through. 

Much like Sarah Bacon’s set, which extends into a city map resembling a cracked vinyl record, Coburn Gray’s Dublin is detached yet connected. Carefree Kate and Rob have just brought their new child into the world when time jumps again. Director Caitríona McLaughlin’s production for the Abbey Theatre and Soho Theatre finds its own poetry, ushering in smoke like passing cloud over Dublin as we leap 30 years into the past.

The Eighties are seen as a less friendly decade. A pregnant woman Brigit (Clare McKenna), struggling with her distant husband (Dan Monaghan), is expected to deal alone with a life forever changed by motherhood. Coburn Gray seems to be interested in differences between eras, but as the needle skips back and forth between grooves - from Brigit, to Kate and Rob, to an awkward teenager in the present (Amy Conroy) - it’s the commonalities that are striking. They are all somehow family, going through the same rites of wooing, loving and changing. 

That’s also a lot of ground for the play to travel. Too much, really. Along the way, there’s little help from the otherworldly design to distinguish between different periods. Bacon’s costuming is all darker shades and doesn’t effectively track who’s who. 

Because the characters are given to actors playing multiple roles, and their arcs mostly detailed by narrators, they appear more like snapshots then full-bodied portraits. Next to In Our Veins and It Was Easy (in the End) - also written by playwrights developing their voice in an era of austerity - it appears that Aristotelian unities went out in the recession.

Most interestingly, the play has things to say about aging but, sadly, it chooses to do so through chunks of wordy rhetoric. (“The present is dead,” says Brigit. “The future is a ghost”). It’ll come as no surprise that Citysong was initially commissioned as a piece of spoken word, but these tragicomic notes have yet to become its music.