Cork Midsummer Festival 2026: Pool (No Water)

Liv O'Donoghue, Jacob McCarthy, Evanna Lynch and Rowan Finken in Pool (No Water). Image, soundofphotography

*****

Pool (No Water). The words in italics essential. Mark Ravenhill’s excoriating interrogation of humanity and art affirming a self-evident truth. That when it comes to manufactured meaning and self-justifying snake oil, art is the greatest false religion of them all. All compromised Franciscans, no St. Francis. Ravenhill’s tale of four second rate artists and their financially successful fifth sees jealous hatred justified as universally ordained. Opportunism and moral decrepitude a righting of cosmic wrongs. For there, but for the grace of a godless God, might go I. To enjoy fame, fortune, respect, nutritionists, personal trainers and a private, indoor swimming pool. Art’s not fair. There must be a reckoning. What’s truly not fair is that this viscerally brilliant production doesn’t get to run and run.

Narratively, four failed artists are invited by their hugely successful fifth to visit her newly installed swimming pool. Like some judgemental college reunion, envy rests its emerald gaze on their wealthy host. Whose unexpected dive into the empty swimming pool leaves her body broken. Pool (No Water) opening into JG Ballard Crash territory as all four begin photographing her mangled body before calling an ambulance. Art in the name of art for art’s sake. The act repeated daily as she convalesces for weeks in a coma. Manipulating the light and her twisted limbs for photographic integrity. Until she awakens and they shift from hypocrital housemates to housemaids. Yet how long can the collective hide their genuine resentment of the individual, and at what cost revenge for their lack of success?

Written in 2006, Pool (No Water) interrogates the enfant terrible, disgustingly lucrative, British art aesthetics as defined by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Director Des Kennedy superlatively coaxing Ravenhill’s whirlwind into a verbal storm. One that cracks with electricity, sweeping everything aside in its relentless path. Kennedy superbly articulating Ravenhill’s one voice collective. The voice of the beehive, speaking in turns, all of the one thing. Four worker drones next to their queen whose distance and presence defines them. Their thinking a series of potent juxtapositions; presence and absence, creation and curation, authorship and ownership, success and failure, art and life. Kennedy’s masterful direction accented beautifully by Luke Murphy's choreographic snapshots. Peter Power’s compositions and sound design adding layered context from Balearic sensuality, loved up haze, or the chronic violent shock of the come down. Valentina Gambardella's understated costumes rounding out some smartly impressive design.

Liv O'Donoghue in Pool (No Water). Image, soundofphotography

At the centre of which lies Sabine Dargent’s gorgeously transformed, site specific swimming pool in the Metropole Hotel with its old world statues and opulence. Surrounded by seats, with scattered benches inside the pool; the audience can sit, stand, or move about the interior of the pool as cast embrace every inch of the space. Four crowning, physically articulate performances setting this visceral experience alight. The mercurial Evanna Lynch's piercing, emotional expressiveness speaking multitudes in a fraction of a second. Liv O’Donoghue, in arguably her best performance to date, shifting effortlessly from histrionic to zoned out, to calm practicality. Rowan Finken’s drug addicted dreamer living it large, at least to himself, bombastically sensitive. Jacob McCarthy heartbreakingly brilliant as the group’s charismatic charmer, wearing his battered heart on his tattered sleeve as the collective embrace painful, self-awareness.

Viscerally thought provoking, emotionally resonant, grown-up, contemporary, and prompting as many questions as it answers, Pool (No Water) makes for sensational theatre. In which art in late stage capitalism finds good people doing bad things and bad people doing good things. Art and its vanities impacting on lives less ordinary and lives less than ordinary. If there’s hints of Ayn Rand's creative elitism, it only adds to Ravenhill’s provocations. Whatever way you turn - composition, space, energy, tech, performances off the charts or direction out of this world - Pool (No Water) proves a monstrously brilliant tour de force.

Pool (No Water) by Mark Ravenhill, presented by The Everyman Theatre in association with Cork Midsummer Festival, runs as part of Cork Midsummer Festival 2026 until June 21st.

For more information visit Cork Midsummer Festival 2026 or The Everyman