Simply delirious

Playwright Enda Walsh’s Delirium is an extreme reinterpretation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov – a hybrid of obscene puppetry, surreal dance, and provocative animation that transports the audience to a horrorscape of a family in collapse. The play is concerned primarily with the destruction of the unattainable – the frustrated pursuit of disinterested lovers, disinterested fathers, and disintegrating spirituality.

The opening and closing of a play are instrumental in the creation of its tone and the dark, dishevelled set and unsettling soundtrack succeed in making the audience feel like they are discovering something intensely private. The stillness of the play’s exposition suggests a desperate desire for unity, love and forgiveness, concepts that Walsh explodes as the lights go up to reveal a family literally tearing itself apart.

This portrayal of a conflicted and conflicting family unit is brash, clear and honest and brings the force and arbitrary nature of obligation to the fore. The disquieting quality of Walsh’s reinterpretation of the original text lies in the characters’ acknowledgement of things that are out of the ordinary. Alyosha’s poncho and spiritual puppet, Fyodor’s fake tan and odd costume: they are all questioned by the characters, making the disintegration of normality all the more pronounced and profound.

The utilisation of puppets by Alyosha and Smerdyakov highlights the perverse and bizarre actions of humanity, emphasising needs and desires that go unfulfilled in our interactions with others and reducing the egotistical race of humanity to nothing more than farcical, savage acts. The bursts of manic dancing emphasise the distances in the play between character and circumstance, desire and actuality, ambition and ability. We witness the servant become master, the son become father and the lover become enemy. In the process, we are taught never to assume what kind of person one is capable of becoming.

Delirium is so intense and bizarre that you find yourself clinging onto its title as the only anchor of logic that runs throughout the entire two-and-a-half-hour production. The temptation to lose yourself in the play is as seductive as it is unnerving and is prevented only by moments of extreme shock or softness that deny the possibility of a complete mental escape route. The storyline feels secondary to the performance itself, in that it is the only influence on these otherwise uncontrollable characters.

The violence and misery laid out before the audience is a force that threatens to take away hope. The final scene between Alysoha and Smerdyakov forces us to question how the idea of hope could even exist. What we see and hear is a story of unadultered depravity, with effectual use of fast moving images behind the fast-speaking Smerdyakov, the image of a memory forced to relive a knowledge it does not desire.

What Enda Walsh has given us is a play that shows hope destroyed but which reminds us that, as we watch this destruction, we are not a part of it. We are somehow saved and somehow have the chance to begin afresh. So begin.