This week Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk turns the Corpus Playroom into a body of play, in a room it deconstructs and redraws at once with both musicality and disjunction. Engaging in a world somewhere between the real and the dreamt, the remembered and the formulated, 1 and 2, played by Mark Jones and Bella Ridgwell respectively, act out a narrative within their own conscious frame of the world. Redefining the very idea of a ‘living room’, 1 and 2 create a space which simultaneously shapes their existence within it, and Ballyturk offers not an imaginary escape but an exploration of the confines of the outside.

Directed by Elizabeth Laurence, Ballyturk, while a seemingly ambiguous piece, is in reality far more coherent in what emerges as a routine of the unexpected, and an understanding that we come to towards the end of the play, that leaves us feeling the beginning made more sense than the end. Jones and Ridgwell were astounding in their presentation of characters animated in their very stagnation, and working with Movement Director Jess Wilson, have created a sense of physicality in what comes across as an external claustrophobia of the internal.

“Ballyturk offers not an imaginary escape but an exploration of the confines of the outside”

In portraying the characters of 1 and 2’s imagination, the actors performed with dance-like quality, and the contrast in such physical presentations of fear and the feared was a testament to Jones, Ridgwell, Laurence and Wilson’s sensitivity to the subtle potential of movement. Conversing with this powerful sense of physicality, the practically seamless contribution of lighting, designed by Lucas Holt and Izzie Sayer, and sound, designed by Rory Clarke, worked to realise the agency of the characters and their own determined sense of purpose. The energy created by the actors’ interaction with the music provides a hilariously subtle commentary on what is made to sound very much like the play is made to look, with the colour and simplicity of the set, designed by Aoife Pallister Begadon, Ilya Wray and Ariel de la Garza, similarly presenting us with allusions to both reality and its own recognisable caricatures.

The lighting works well in becoming a very active part of the set, interacting with the actors as they navigate their own projected reality. Jones and Ridgwell take possession of this shifting sense of space with a natural ease to portray a simultaneous sense of anxiety, with the creation of shadows and the clever use of a light switch bringing the characters to a world that exists in the ‘inbetween’ of the in and outside.

“Jones and Ridgwell take possession of this shifting sense of space with a natural ease to portray a simultaneous sense of anxiety”

Entering as an embodiment of the outside which seems more confident but no more sure in the value of this existence, 3, played by Kitty Ford, brings what seems like an inevitable turning point to the play. Without coming across as predictable, however, this interjection is intricately considered by Ford in balancing a calm acknowledgement of the terrifying understanding that “everything is eaten by the now” The voices of Martin Carter and Sarah Mulgrew were also highly effective in drawing the characters’ attention to this strange in-between space of equating the outside with accumulated experiences, and the ease of their speech rendered the phrase “hello in there” less incomprehensible than it might otherwise seem.

As a fly on a wall itself made malleable by such a successful collaboration of movement, sound and speech, Ballyturk places its audience on a boundary not unlike the one being explored by its characters. As a digestion of what we think about thinking, and how we think thinking might make us think, this play consumes our assumptions about living in reality, to reconstitute them in an exciting configuration of internal and external space.

Ballyturk is playing at the Corpus Playroom Wed 25 May to Sat 28 May at 7:00pm