Flight of the demon in Dublin...

TERMINUS, Lowry, Salford
IT starts with the approaching, deafening sound of the beating of a demon’s wings, and an hour and 40 interval-free minutes later it ends with the same sound in retreat.

In-between, Mark O’Rowe’s three-handed poetry reading, which he also directs, offers an incredible ride; too static and stylised to be “theatre” exactly, but packed with the energy of violence, humour, flight, sex and angels giving a demon a bit of a kicking. It’s that kind of evening...

The show is the first import to the north of England by Ireland’s “national theatre”, the Abbey from Dublin. Just back from a rip-roaring tour of the US, its three performers — Olwen Fouere, Catherine Walker and Declan Conlon, known only as A, B and C — give an astonishing display of memory, performance and feel for O’Rowe’s words.

Shot through with rhymes simply because the author realised there were some rhyming lines early on, and decided to see if he could keep it up, the play consists of three interwoven monologues, though — as in the film Crash, where disparate stories are connected — we don’t realise such until well into the evening.

C is a man who sold his soul to the devil in return for a glorious singing voice — but was made too shy to sing in public, so substituted burning resentment and murderous hatred, particularly of women, instead.

Woman A, in her forties, is a failed Samaritan, teacher and mother, who substitutes for these a dogged disregard for personal safety in attempting to save one of her former pupils from a vicious bully.

Girl B, meanwhile, in her mid-twenties and lonely, embarks on the most fantastical night of her life when, lured to the top of a crane on a building site, she falls and is caught by a flying demon. They end up in love, and running from angels who insist her preordained death must occur, as it would have in the fall.

How these stories interact we needn’t go into, except to say the way they do is often bleakly, wonderfully funny.

O’Rowe masterfully mixes painful real-world lives with otherworldly metaphors, and describes them both in glorious stories and language, rhyming or not.

This isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but sink quickly and easily into the rhythm and invention of his storytelling and there is incredible depth and humour to be enjoyed.