Sonya Kelly’s ‘The Last Return’ is a spectacular exercise in stretching out a sketch that by rights should have maybe ten minutes of life in it out for almost an hour and a half.
The entire show is set in the returns queue of a theatre, following a growing succession of prickly, weird characters all desperate to snag a last-minute ticket to the final performance of a show by a playwright called ‘Oppenheimer’.
Sara Joyce’s production for Druid sneaks up on you incrementally. In the beginning, it’s a pretty simplistic sitcom-style set up. A prissy, self-important middle-aged lady holding an umbrella – Fiona Bell’s Umbrella Woman – is trying to get Anna Healy’s dead-eyed, jobsworth Ticket Person to explain how she can get a ticket to the sold-out show, eventually extracting the information that returns will go on sale ten minutes before it starts. At this point the queue consists of one man – Bosco Hogan’s grumpy Newspaper Man – and a seat that an unseen young woman has reserved by leaving her bag on it, much to the consternation of the Umbrella Woman.
Gradually, Kelly’s script juices up the surrealism. Things move away from the humdrum when we discover the two queuers’ outlandish reasons for wanting to snag tickets. The situation gets weirder as they’re joined in the queue by a young Somali woman – Naima Swaleh’s Woman in Pink – who only communicates via a translation app on her phone, and a US airman – Fionn Ó Loingsigh’s Military Man.
Essentially Kelly has taken a pretty hackneyed idea for a comedy sketch fed it up, stretched it out and mutated it, morphing something mundane into something pretty audacious, like seeing a pigeon the size of mountain.
To be honest, I think it bites off more than it can chew: I don’t really want to get into spoilers territory, but let’s just say it gets increasingly silly, while also trying to function as a fiery allegory for colonialism, while also grafting on an extremely unearned sentimental twist.
Nonetheless, even if it tried some stuff that ultimately didn’t work for me, there’s no denying the singularity of the endeavour.