The First Bad Man: Characters go off the track inside Pan Pan’s obsessive book club
Miranda July’s wild novel becomes a beacon for individuals to reveal their lonely lives. Photo: Ros Kavanagh
Wesley House, Dublin Theatre Festival
★ ★ ★
A committee, someone once said, is a group of people who keep minutes and waste hours. That description would serve the characters of Pan Pan’s new play The First Bad Man, who, as members of an obsessive book club, take a long time to accomplish something, if anything.
In the homey surroundings of a Methodist church, copies of The First Bad Man, Miranda July’s wild debut novel, are piled-up and displayed like religious artefacts. The book’s protagonist Cheryl is a self-disciplined woman who has an abrupt awakening, nosediving into a world of abuse and sex when she allows her boss’s daughter to stay with her. (An audience might arrive with their own opinions about what happens – the play sends them the book in the post).
It’s easy to see director Gavin Quinn and designer Aedín Cosgrove’s attraction, after nearly three decades of making absurdist theatre, to July’s prose, which is riven with oddities. One member of the club, Kitty (an intensely serious Judith Roddy), points out a moment in the novel that’s difficult to interpret, where Cheryl leaves her intimate houseguest to visit a man she has a crush on. The group perform a role-play of the scene, leading them to divine their own meanings. Kitty is fascinated by the encounter as a moment of complicity. John - a subversive figure wearing a headband, who cajoles the group into listening to his offbeat theories about art and therapy in Andrew Bennett’s sly performance - is most gratified by playing the role of a man with a nice car.
Discussions about art, the play understands, are often accompanied by self-analysis. A less garrulous member of the club, Luka Costello’s astute Rose, reviews a moment in the book when Cheryl visits a psychotherapist solely for the purpose of being able to talk about the experience with someone she longs to speak to, leading Rose to reflect on a sweet romantic charade of her own. Over the course of their meetings, the club is allured by comparisons found between them and July’s characters.
There is an arch sense in the playscript created by Mish Grigor and Quinn, with a wealth of collaborators, that this hybrid of literary criticism and self-discovery is a poisoned chalice. As the readers’ findings become unceasingly tangential, arriving at random outcomes, they may appear dangerously self-centred enough to dominate conversation, or detour it from the novel completely. When a scene where Cheryl urinates into a plastic cup triggers a far-fetched, spiralling discussion about different bodies of water, members of the club attach straying meanings – from a connection to the sexist myth of Lorelai on the Rhine, to the benefits of rebirthing therapy.
Grigor and Quinn’s preferred interpretation seems to be the heartening idea of art and art lovers as life-altering chance encounters. July’s novel becomes a beacon for these individuals to reveal glimpses of their own lonely, doubt-filled lives. Yet, by allowing them to dive so enthusiastically into their own solipsism, the play refuses any connection between them.
Runs until 17th October.