Penelope

I remarked of Enda Walsh's earlier plays, The Walworth Farce and The New Electric Ballroom, that his characters were trapped inside their own myths. In his latest drama, premiered by Druid at the Galway arts festival, he has gone a stage further: he shows four modern men confined by Homeric legend. The result is a wild, crazy, word-drunk piece that intoxicates and baffles, but is destined to lodge in the memory.

Walsh plays on the myth of Penelope, who tricked her suitors for 20 years as she awaited the return of Odysseus. Here he shows us four men of different ages, apparently refugees from the world of Irish business, all competing for the hand of a modern Ionian Penelope. The oddity is that they are living in an empty swimming pool on their beloved's estate, complete with barbecue, drinks trolley, stereo and CCTV camera; and, as they each make one last desperate pitch for her affections, she appears on an upper level to listen to their flailing bids.

So what's going on? Given that the suitors, who range from a macho muscle-flexer to a fidgety scholar, are all involved in the same hopeless quest, the play could be seen as a satire on the competitive male ego. At other times, since this disharmonious quartet faces almost certain extinction, I took it to be a Beckettian piece about the need to confront death with whatever courage you can muster. But, even if the play is slippery, it lives theatrically through Walsh's astonishing way with words. One speech, delivered by the ageing, drug-addled Fitz to Penelope, offers a mesmerising vision of the half-truths of the supposedly real world from one who has abandoned it. Superbly performed by Niall Buggy, it turns from lyrical despair into a touching declaration of love.

Although Walsh's lust for language is stronger than his dramatic impetus, the 90-minute piece constantly stimulates the nervous system. Mikel Murfi's Druid Theatre production builds to a bizarre climax in which Karl Shiels, as the self-styled mighty Quinn, does a brilliant quick-change act in which he impersonates legendary lovers from Napoleon and Josephine to Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara. Denis Conway as a bullish troubador, Tadhg Murphy as a youthful romantic and Olga Wehrly as the enigmatic Penelope add to the intrigue. However indefinable its meaning, it proves that Walsh possesses a truly original theatrical voice.

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