Declan Hughes doesn't go in for simple narrative. His plays are strewn with spectral intimations and the movement of spirits, often towards forgiveness and redemption. Hughes's last play to visit the mainland, New Morning, was a heady brew of the outlandish and supernatural with a look-alike Elvis popping up as temptor to a couple of squabbling, grieving sisters.
This time, more ambitiously, Dubliner Hughes has taken on the end of the world, no less. Millennial grief, global plague, human despair, all these are sucked up into a typhoon of Irish gothic distemper in which Christ's death on the cross and resurrection somehow gets translated into an Irish graphic designer's death from Aids in San Francisco being taken as a miracle and sign to make changes in their own lives by an erstwhile group of Irish friends, awaiting his arrival in an isolated, wind-swept cottage on Ireland's west coast.
Of course our sense of credulity is stretched to the utmost. Apocalyptic visions abound in sudden snatches of heavenly music, phone calls from the deceased or possibly undead, designer Kathy Strachan's fin-de-siecle decadence - a riot of velvet and leathery excess - and Hughes's group of young, educated proto-film-makers and desultory media types winding themselves up into a fair old lather on wheels of self-destructive licence, recrimination, and betrayal.
Yet amid all the clamour and a script of bleakly contemporary humour, a desire for that preposterously unfashionable idea of ''belief'' can be heard struggling to be heard.
Lynne Parker's Rough Magic production, for once, shudders and stalls a bit but still engenders an uncomfortably visionary sense of general disquiet as we approach the new millennium.
n Hallowe'en Night is at the
Donmar until Saturday.
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