Will I See You There review: Eavesdropping on a touching reunion in a city square

 

In this slick play-installation, the audience peers down from above and listens to a chance encounter between friends through headphones. 

Gallery of Photography, Dublin Fringe Festival

★ ★ ★ ★ 

The ground tiles in Meeting House Square alternate between white and grey like a plastic chequerboard. For passers-by it is a sanctuary from busy Dublin streets, a place where shoppers sit on benches and slabs of contemporary design attract skateboarders. On one side of the square a popular Italian eatery hums with diners sitting outside. On the opposite side a vacant restaurant site sits neglected and empty like a defeated dream, tagged with graffiti. 

In Will I See You There, the new installation-play by Murmuration, Meeting House Square kind of feels like a three-dimensional artwork. Its audience gathers in a room high above the square and peers down through a window. There are moments when the ambience of Jennifer O’Malley’s excellent sound design creates an evocative backdrop, replacing the everyday grit of the city with the bright fluidity of a dream. 

Playwright James Elliott’s follow-up to Summertime - another drama viewed from a distance - is a slick work of broad imagination. The faraway actors aren't only synced up with dialogue heard through the audience’s headphones but also abstract internal thoughts. “Cut adrift,” says Dee (Nessa Matthews) with a reciting tone, before walking into the square and awkwardly catching the eye of her old friend Fin (Finbarr Doyle) sitting nearby. 

A funny, excruciating reunion follows, with both parties poking fun at old memories while skirting cautiously around unsaid feelings. Dee has been living in Berlin with her girlfriend for several years, and resents that her return hasn’t attracted more attention. In a stealthy comic performance, Doyle’s Fin shrinks away from her questions, agonising with face-scrunches that are big enough to be seen from far away without pulling us into a broader comedy. All the while, internal panics (“Why would you say that?!”) give external dialogue a nice electrical charge. 

The square isn’t just an urban refuge in director John King’s meticulous production. As the plot steers towards the friends’ last encounter, a random phone call in the middle of the night from the streets of Berlin, Matthews’ Dee paces the square as if drawn in by the pull of recollection, floating across a memory-scape where a closed down restaurant isn’t the only symbol of decay. 

Murmuration knows that in art, no less than in life, eavesdropping is a way to pick up on what we miss. Digging through the layers of this touching reunion, we discover a crushing misconnection, a cry for help that was made but quickly got lost in the Dublin din. 

Runs until 9th September.