St. Nicholas at Seanachaí Theatre Company | Theater review

Conor McPherson’s cracking good yarn from 1997 concerns a drama critic who becomes a monster. Sorry, that’s probably redundant. It’s about a drama critic who becomes a particular kind of monster—a panderer for a coven of vampires living in the London suburbs. His job is to find fresh victims for the bloodsuckers (they prefer the young).

Before he gets to the vampires, our antihero describes his previous job at a Dublin newspaper, where he used his poison pen to strike terror and loathing in the hearts of the city’s theatrical community. As played by Steve Pickering, he’s the sort of prick who clearly savors a contempt for humanity so vast as to include even himself. With his crisp consonants and bulldog-like build, Pickering conveys both smugness and thuggishness.

He also deftly navigates the monologue’s teasing twists and turns as well as its mix of storytelling genres (including gothic horror, folk tale and male-menopause bildungsroman). Pickering’s American accent can be distracting since the play is set in contemporary Dublin and London and we don’t say “bollocks” over here. The only other misstep in Matthew Miller’s stripped-bare staging comes toward the end, when Pickering starts reading his lines from a notebook rather than reciting them from memory, as if to underline what McPherson has made clear: that the critic, after feeding on other people’s work, has at last found his own story to tell.