Some Names Were Changed review: Fiction brings us closer to the truth in this cluttered documentary play

In Ross Dungan and Ronan Phelan's new interactive play, the audience help tell the story of a married couple. Photo: Patricio Cassinoni

Project Arts Centre - Space Upstairs, Dublin Fringe Festival
★ ★ ★

Truth is stranger than fiction, everyone knows, because the latter is obliged to stick to possibilities. Some Names Were Changed, the new interactive documentary play by 15th Oak Productions, seems to go by Mark Twain’s adage. Real events can be more absurd than imaginable.

For instance, level-headed sane people can volunteer for audience participation quite willingly, especially when guided by the arch performer Manus Halligan. Joining him on a stage occupied by storage boxes of documents, two people read out a scene from a Dublin pub in 1989. A woman named Alice confidently asks bartender Sean to accompany her to a house party. Weeks pass and he finds himself falling in love.

More astonishing are the disastrous events that make up the play’s production history. Halligan explains that playwright Ross Dungan read about Alice and Sean in a news story about an unusual custodial case. He developed this documentary with director Ronan Phelan, acquiring additional drafts from different writers. What’s unlikely here isn’t that the production received a rare Arts Council grant - it’s that a solicitor’s letter threatened the play’s depiction of events, the lead actor suffered a terrible bike accident, all weeks before a slot at a major theatre festival. 

The solicitor is concerned about an “artist’s interpretation of events,” so the play instead relies on the audience to play Alice and Sean, jumping into scenes showing the early stages of their marriage. There’s a passive aggressive cup of tea with a troubled mother-in-law. Goofy photographs from holidays are re-staged. Three different women are asked to read aloud Alice’s difficulties with her pregnancy, as Sean plays an odd game of cards in the hospital waiting room.

Such incongruities are intriguing, giving a subtle distrust of what we’re seeing, similar to the passing down of myth in Dungan’s past play Before Monsters Were Made. As a playwright, he seems interested in the pastoralism of the art, the tapestry of voices from The Life and Sort of Death of Eric Argyle, except here the audience are requested to give expression as opposed to a large cast of characters.

That feels important, as the play begins to expose its own embellishments. If Twain says truth is strange, Dungan and Phelan know that fiction is persuasive. We realise that chunks of the play are actually slanted, if not fabricated, to manipulate the audience, to confront us with our own bias, as the violence in Alice and Sean’s marriage comes to light. 

Fiction might seem antithetical to a documentary, but here it’s marvellously effective in bringing us closer to real events. The problem is that the play spends so much time setting up these illusions about its production history and stripping them away, it eats up scenes showing Alice and Sean. (Halligan, quick on his feet, tells the lighting operator to skip cues as we run overtime).

Those unseen scenes seem important in showing the warning signs of an abusive marriage. Comparatively, so much of the set-up - the scenes with email exchanges between the creative team, the pressures of playing the theatre festival, the inventing of involved playwrights - don’t feel as important. It just makes everything cluttered, though there’s no denying the clarity of the play's final testimonies, as some names are changed back. 


Runs until Sep 21.