Review: Revenant
If there’s an air of the familiar about the horror motifs and plot elements in Stewart Roche’s play, this is not a problem in itself. What distinguishes excellent genre fiction from the merely mediocre, however, is how freshly it deploys or challenges those conventions. On that score Revenant is disappointing. Roche’s horror tropes are not reworked with any vigour and their potential is suffocated as a result.
This doesn’t make it an awful play, or prevent it from providing an entertaining experience. The charisma of its one-man performer (Simon Toal) and Roche’s flair for comic writing are both enjoyable. Yet even the play’s comic-horror aspects tend to promise more than they deliver. For instance, the plot involves a short film being made on an island off the coast of Mayo, a zombie film set during the Famine. The mere notion raises some hearty laughs. But it also raises audience expectations and, sadly, the potential for irreverence and/or depth goes abegging.
