“APOCALYPSE, THEN” REVIEW – EVENING ECHO: ENTERTAINING TALE OF STRANDED ODD COUPLE

By Liam Heylin

THIS new play involving the last two people to survive the apocalypse — two Corkmen as it happens — is an enjoyable small-scale studio production at the Everyman.

Ciaran Fitzpatrick and John McCarthy wrote this entertaining vision of humanity trying to stay afloat after a flood, where one turns to the other and asks if they are “in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean,” only to be told that they are in Mitchelstown, floating over the bypass. 

Director Sara Jane Power’s response to the piece is to play it low-key.  At times, its Monty Pythonesque moments could signal a departure from any rhyme or reason, but the director anchors the work, so to speak, in the characters rather than the surrealism or their lack of place.

This is a feisty and engaging response to Three Men in a Boat, rendered as two men in a box and a bathtub.   They yearn for women, despair of ever being able to conjure a woman’s image, only to find – holy of holies – a copy of The Sun with a Page 3 girl.  

One nagging feeling about the entertaining hour or so is that it is sometimes that bit too self-conscious to relax totally into itself as a drama.  That could ease out with a few more performances.

But actors Raymond Scannell and Paul Mulcahy play it out very well – Mulcahy all cranky, nerdy and self-obsessed; Scannell coming across as the guy who is full of beans, full of the joys and happy to suf on the unpredictable sea of life.  And it has some nice humour that pops up on the blindside, like the line that they might be the best Irish language speakers left in the world.  The play is then equally comfortable in slipping into philisophical imponderables, like whether or not there is a God presiding over their fate.

They’re an odd couple worth meeting – one of them is even called Felix.

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