Inis Nua Theatre Company presents Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott

Owen crams enough drama and plot into his one-woman show, now onstage via Inis Nua Theatre Company, to fill ten Hellenic tragedies. We first meet Effie (Campbell O’Hare) careening drunkenly through the title neighborhood in Cardiff, Wales, a former industrial stronghold fallen on hard times. Aimless and with few options, she exists in a perpetual state of revelry, which leads her to become pregnant by a disabled ex-soldier for whom she feels both attraction and pity.

I shouldn’t reveal anything more, lest I give the game away—but suffice it to say that Effie’s story doesn’t end with a happy family in a three-bedroom house. The various traumas she endures are more of the “everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end” variety. Owens infuses his script with cataclysmic scenarios that reach titanic torrents of emotions, though without the grandeur of Greek drama to buoy them, the result sometimes seems tawdry. The audience becomes a voyeuristic participant in Effie’s pain, rather than a sympathetic witness to it.

Seeking a believable journey

That would be okay if Owen’s writing, and Kittson O’Neill’s production, fully invested in ratcheting up that discomfiting divide. But although the monologue begins confrontationally, with Effie acknowledging and chiding her spectators, it pulls back before it ever truly burrows under the skin. Likewise, for large swaths of this staging, Effie seems to forget that she’s performing for a crowd, only to turn outward again when the drama reaches a fever pitch. Such a choice creates distance where a feeling of inexorability would be preferable.

O’Hare, a skilled technical actor, excels when Effie is in extremis. She delivers an intensely physical performance, underlining nearly every word with a gesture or action. What her characterization lacks, though, is the sense of interiority that makes Effie’s shift from good-time girl to self-sacrificing martyr a believable journey—although the shallowness of Owen’s writing and O’Neill’s single-speed direction don’t help matters there either.

A long 95 minutes

At 95 minutes, the show already feels like a very long sit, and this relatively static physical production doesn’t help matters. Melpomene Katakalos’s abstract scenic design, a foreboding Splott skyline, severely restricts the already small playing area in the Drake’s Louis Bluver Theatre, leaving O’Hare to confine her outsize performance to a relatively claustrophobic patch near the front of the stage. Shannon Zura’s lighting often seems too bright and focused for a story with intense psychological dimensions, although the sound design (by Damien Figueras) does a solid job of underpinning Effie’s inner turmoil.

There are other elements of Iphigenia in Splott that give this viewer pause, like the icky politics of a male playwright essentially crafting a modern-day madonna/whore dichotomy for his sole female character. And although Effie and the play itself rage toward catharsis, you’re left with a sense of not much gained—or lost. The Greeks give you tragedy, but here it’s just trouble.

Know before you go: Iphigenia in Splott depicts medical trauma surrounding pregnancy and childbirth that might be uncomfortable for some viewers.