Review: JELLYFISH - Pulsating Through a Sea of Troubles

By: Sep. 07, 2015
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When you're young you can be promised the world. For teenage Alice Malseed, the loyalty of a drama teacher who didn't spill the secret of her underage clubbing made the future seem hopeful. Less memorable years later is that confidante's name, lost somewhere over tipples of toffee vodkas and LSD-trips: "Sarah or Denise of whatshername".

Malseed is exemplifiable of a millennial burnt out by their late twenties, squeaking past monthly rent on minimum-wage jobs. Working within a system that estranges it's lower-paid, here she tries to direct her outrage towards a worthwhile target.

That anger teeters and threatens to collapse in a script written in bombastic passages, pulsating through a sea of troubles but heavily piling detail onto detail. Thankfully director Sarah Baxter takes firm hold and spreads the playing to every inch of the Project Cube stage, demonstrating a rich visual sensibility throughout. Plumes of smoke are released that hang bodingly in Adrian Mullan's aqueous lighting.

As the intense pace of the monologue ebbs back and forth, the personal and the political become porous. However, you'd prefer the latter; Malseed's testimony of her own life remains distanced, propped up by stylistic flourishes rather than emotional recollection. As a result, her rage doesn't jump far from that proverbial chip on her shoulder. Similarly, the hope for regeneration isn't strongly punctuated.

It is her embodiment of broader themes that works better, as she woozily exclaims during one of her drug highs: "Time is moving in slow motion". This bespeaks the ennui of a generation whose futures were dashed in the bust, for whom opportunities aren't arriving fast enough in a world stung into paralysis.

Jellyfish runs at Project Arts Centre as part of Tiger Dublin Fringe Festival until 11 Sept. For more information and tickets, see the Fringe website.



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