Rough is a tone poem riff of a play by Grace Dyas, dipping, dodging, repeating phrases, swimming in the same stream of consciousness sea as Frisco beatnik poets, ripped up Cosmo past issues and Brendan Behan. Told through the frame of mirrors by two nameless girls on opposite sides of the Liffey divide living the same drunken, fucking, brittle, lost girl existence. This is a story about nothing it starts. They take us through a night out, a girls night out, the naggin and litre of Coke from Centra, the buzz, maintaining that buzz, getting and feeling something, anything, home with that pre-selected random guy, a man, a boy, So big, so hard, counting the thrusts into their own bodies, lying under male weight in some vague suburban home and not screaming as they come because they don't want to offend. The air is alive with criss-crossing carnal thoughts. They want to feel dirty, they love sex, they hate sex; You are a story about fuck me hard.The entire piece feels like a flashing, sobering realization, a single moment as a girl catches herself in the bathroom mirror at a club just as the surge of alcohol subsides, the music dims to a thrum, and just at that second, as she watches a bead of water drip down her cheek, she realizes she doesn't feel anything, anything at all. Images like this only come from powerful performances which Roxanna Nic Liam and Aoibhin Garrihy deliver. Both are counterpoint to each other, riffing, conflicting and merging with force and fluidity. Ms. Nic Liam has a lucent intensity and provides both strength and frailty to her role, leaning expertly from one to the other as called for. Ms. Garrihy douses the pulchritude of her character with a wry take. Despite flickers of self-consciousness, there's a sense of danger to her like polished flint. Throughout the piece the two put on different dresses hanging down from the ceiling as if trying on different skins. Those dresses form part of Doireann Coady's set which brings sharp focus to the flux in play with elegant symbols; a ladder, a huge measuring tape, a swing. Music pervades the piece, an electronica backdrop by Frank Sweeney that wends its way in and out of the women's words, setting atmosphere but never dominating it. The only overpowering element is the language. It has a lyrical force, an urgent rhythm, provoking and exploring words to the hum of feral impulses writhing beneath female layers. If ever there was a post-feminist, coming of age portrait of women in search of lost identity through all the wrong ways, this is it.
