Swimming against the tide - review of “Airswimming” by Charlotte Jones at the Irish Rep

Cahir O'Doherty reviews the play

The problem is that the metaphors in the script that are meant to underline their plight end up being heavy handed. How much poetry is there really in prolonged and pointless suffering, particularly when it has been created by a society that wants to contain and forget them? 

Dora, being quite sane, has no time for romantic illusions, and she capsizes Persephone’s airy notions with judicious douses of cold hard reality. 

But Jones then informs us that this tough talking woman, who has saved both Persephone and herself multiple times, has in fact been self-deceiving and full of empty bravado all along. When Dora finally loses track of time, a skill that had once helped to define her, we guess a suicide attempt is in the offing. 

It’s the schematic construction of the play (it has a curiously mathematical shape where events unfold with a weary inevitability) that dissatisfies. As it jolts awkwardly from realism to magic realism, from documentary to Greek myth, from testament to satire, it holds the audience at a remove. 

We don’t in the end learn a lot about these two women. They were sane and unfairly imprisoned, certainly, but what else?
Dora was androgynous and had given birth to children out of wedlock; Persephone had an affair and had the child that resulted from it taken from her before she could even name it. 

Hidden beneath the playwright’s ornaments is a thoroughgoing tragedy, but as a result of her script’s almost ceaseless ambivalence, it never quite emerges.

Airswimming is playing at the Irish Rep until February 3. Visit www.irishrep.org for showtimes and tickets.

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