Late Night Station

Andy Crook and Sean Doyle in Late Night Station. Image, Liadh Connolly 

**

Even the best have less than stellar days. Like the revived Corp Ensemble’s current production of Andy Crook’s Late Night Station. In which Kafka meets Beckett as two security guards wait for something to happen in an unnamed security room guarding an unknown place full of unknown people or things. Structured loosely around Waiting for Godot, two men talk to put in the time, weirder people arrive to break up their monotony, dogs bark, radios play and people eventually die in an effort to mean something absurdly existential. Yet what it ultimately means is that Crook’s strained comedy is weaker than the sum of its political and philosophical parts. The whole redeemed by genuine ambition, some hilarious moments, and a standout performance by Sean Doyle.

Sean Doyle in Late Night Station. Image, Liadh Connolly 

If the set is defined by mostly superfluous detail, it loses out to a more vividly realised fourth wall. Whose unseen screens Andy Crook’s irate Wise monitors and records. Meanwhile, Sean Doyle’s laconic Flanagan monitors and records Wise. Tarantino style conversations, in which the meaningless tries to signify as meaning, loop around 60's guitar rock, fleshy paintings, conspiracy theories, and half a day’s training are punctured by some groovy dancing. And so the engine idles, but goes nowhere till about the midway mark. The sudden appearance of Gemma Allan’s unnamed fainter shoehorning in a set up for the play's central ideas. In which Graeme Coughlan’s machine gun toting, militarised murderer spins and re-spins reality to suit the oppressor. What’s seen with our own eyes altered and reframed. Crook’s themes of oppression and violence speaking to a cluster of Orwellian notions around victims and complicity. Life, the afterlife, death, art and violence all mused upon in a meandering fashion, culminating in a final outburst of brilliantly choreographed violence.

Graeme Coughlan, Andy Crook and Sean Doyle in Late Night Station. Image, Liadh Connolly 

Under Jed Murray’s uncharacteristically uneasy direction, Late Night Station opts to go big or go home. If the approach serves its physical comedy, dance routines and fight choreography, it reduces everything else to cartoon bombast. Crook’s overwritten and underdeveloped ideas constantly delivered as over the top exaggeration. Absent characters you care about, or are intrigued enough to engage with, it begins to feel like a durational hike punctured by the next comic moment. Crook’s Wise less a character so much as an improvisational exercise, switching from one scene to the next without central cohesion. Coughlan’s one trick poster boy for a ruthless military struggling to be more than a Q and A mouthpiece. Similarly the charismatic Allan, looking like the token female putting in time as a half-baked monologue device. Redeemed by a neat reversal at the end which reveals a feminist subtext in the brilliantly executed final scene. Enlivened, as is Late Night Station throughout, by Sean Doyle’s smartly understated performance. Going small, Doyle tears up the cartoon memo and makes Flanagan the largest, most engaging presence onstage. Showing how less is so much more effective, the real so much more absurd than the absurd, the comic so much more compelling when it doesn’t self-conscious draw attention to itself.

Gemma Allan in Late Night Station. Image, Liadh Connolly 

As a director Andy Crook has produced an enviable body of extremely impressive work. As a writer, Crook's Late Night Station falls short in comparison. Lacking clarity and economy, its philosophical stumbling is best exemplified by its final, pedestrian monologue that batters the audience with potted meaning. The result less a homage to Beckett and Absurdism so much as a pastiche. Yet Late Night Station compensates with some delightful moments of hilarity alongside moments of genuine insight. Crook’s labour of love a genuinely ambitious endeavour. Yet even though its heart is in the right place, it never quite gets its head around its theatrical and thematic ambitions.

Late Night Station by Andy Crook, presented by Corps Ensemble and The New Theatre, in association with The Civic, runs at The New Theatre until July 11.

For more information visit The New Theatre