Delirium is Enda Walsh’s extreme reinterpretation of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, a hybrid of obscene puppetry, surreal dance, provocative animation and sudden song that envelop the sensibilities of an audience and transport them to a horrorscape of a family dynamic that demands collapse. The overall projection of play is the destruction of that which is too far beyond us to attain- the persual of disinterested lovers, disinterested fathers, and disintegrating spirituality.
The opening and closing of a play are instrumental to its overall tone, and the dishevelled darkened set and unsettling choir music succeed in making the audience feel like they are discovering something intensely private, the social taboo of disharmony. The still opening suggests a desperate desire for unity, love and forgiveness, concepts Enda Walsh explodes as the lights go up to reveal the family literally tearing itself apart.
The portrayal of the conflicted and conflicting family unit is brash clear and honest and brings the force and arbitrary nature of obligation to the fore. The disquieting quality of the reinterpretation is in the characters acknowledgement of things out of the ordinary- Alyosha’s poncho and spiritual puppet, Fyodor’s fake tan and odd costume are all questioned by the characters which makes the harsh disjunction of their normality all the more profound.
The utilisation of puppets by Alyosha and Smerdyakov highlights the perverse and bizarre actions of humanity, emphasising the needs and desires that go unfulfilled in our interactions with others, while reducing the egotistical race of humanity to nothing more than its farcical savage acts. The bursts of manic dancing, which suggest a surreal unity, emphasise the distances in the play between character and circumstance, desire and actuality, ambition and ability.We witness the servant become master, the son become father and the lover become the hated, teaching us to never assume what kind of a person someone is capable of becoming.
As a show, Delirium is so intense and bizarre that you find yourself clinging onto its title as the only anchor of logic that runs throughout the two and a half hour production. The temptation to lose yourself in the play is as seductive as it is unnerving, prevented only by moments of extreme shock or softness that deny the possibility of a complete mental escape route. The storyline feels secondary to the performance itself, in that it is the only thing that cages these otherwise uncontrollable characters.