Yokes Night

Back in March last year, lapsed legislation in Ireland opened a loophole that meant cocaine, ketamine, MDMA and other drugs were legal for 24 hours. Scott Lyons’s two-hander is set on that bizarre night. It could be a play that speaks for a disenfranchised generation in Ireland at the moment, and it clearly wants to be, but an uneven tone and a scrappy structure prevent it from achieving that.

Lyons also plays Harry, who meets Saoirse in a bar. Within the course of an evening they fall in love, have sex and kill a man. It starts as a fairly conventional one-person monologue, then Saoirse (Zoe Forrester) enters and it gets progressively stranger. 

Lyons gives an impressively energetic performance, while Forrester is more lacklustre. Direction by Jesse Briton and Dimitris Chimonas sees the two performers moving foam blocks to form different shapes, like beds and walls. 

Before sleeping with each other, Saoirse candidly reveals a traumatic story about her past involving rape and abortion. Of course the abortion debate is an important one, but it feels wedged in here and delivered by a female character who is denied any real personality. She’s a mouthpiece for a viewpoint and the serious issue gets swallowed by the play’s frivolities. 

We slam into an abrupt ending that comes out of nowhere, leaving little resolved. What the play wants to assess is not given the space it needs. There’s promise here, and Lyons clearly has a lot of vital things to say about Ireland today, but it needs polish first.