Edinburgh 2015: The Last Hotel, Royal Lyceum, review: 'seedy menace'

This starts as a horror story, gruesome and compelling. A man and his wife arrive at an empty and decrepit two-star hotel in Ireland, where they meet a glamorous young woman who is paying for their assistance in a plan to gas herself to death. She is neither terminally ill nor in physical pain; her suicidal urge seems if anything to be metaphysical, a longing for oblivion rather than an end to torment.

The husband – a builder who needs money to build an extension to his house – is ready to go ahead, but his wife is more reluctant. The Irish woman is unnerved by phone messages from her abandoned children.
Up to this point – about a third of the way through its eighty-minute duration – the situation marked out by Enda Walsh’s libretto is tantalising, and not so far from tragic tales one reads in the tabloids.

But then the latent tension is dissipated in a lot of windy poetic posturing that fails to add any flesh to the characters’ motives, experience or background. The end result is so opaque and navel-gazing as to seem merely a bit silly.

The score is more consistently intriguing. It is the work of the 45-year-old Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy, based in Princeton (New Jersey) and clearly influenced by the American minimalists John Adams and Steve Reich.

But his idiom doesn’t have their smooth technical assurance; the mood is jaggedly abrasive, intercut with spoken dialogue, sampled episodes and lyrical meanderings that draw inflection from Irish folk traditions.

The orchestration embraces the distinctive sonorities of the pub band: cheap electric guitar, wheezing accordion and penny-whistling tenor recorder and piccolo. It’s music that looks in different directions: I only wish that Dennehy had avoided the post-modernist cliché of pushing the soprano into a hysterical top register where words vanish.

The production is good. Walsh’s staging fails to make some basic narrative points lucidly, but Jamie Vartan’s set creates an appropriate atmosphere of seedy menace. Claudia Boyle (last seen as Mabel in ENO’s The Pirates of Penzance), Katherine Manley and Robin Adams give strongly characterised performances, complemented by Mikel Murfi as a mute hotel porter. Dennehy’s own creation, the Dublin-based Crash Ensemble, accompanies them with bravura, conducted by André de Ridder.

A second hearing would be helpful: there might be more to this than meets the innocent ear. But I rather suspect there is less.

'The Last Hotel' has further performances at the Linbury Studio Theatre, London WC2, Oct 9-17; roh.org.uk