Galway Theatre Festival may have exchanged its Halloween-webbing for the temperate beginnings of May, getting its foot in the door of the festival season before anyone else, but Agustina Muñoz’s play Women Among the Ice has the chills of the dark half of the year. The howl of a blustery wind rings through the former printworks of the Connacht Tribune newspaper. An exhibition intermingles photographs of Arctic peaks and glaciers with drawings by the artist TwitchEye, his rough lines depicting maritime monsters and women with crowns like shards floating over their heads. Blending a believable landscape with fantastical creatures, it sets the tone of Simulacra Theatre Company’s production: the suspended reality of magical realism.

The Argentinian playwright’s drama concerns three women who have left their husbands at a scientific base near the North Pole. “It’s an exhibition about our life and times in Alaska”, according to frazzled Clara (Yvette Picque), who nervously refrains from making eye contact with the audience. Her poised colleague and friend Lourdes (Naia Martinez) speaks in awe of the tundra, almost overwhelmed by visions of the landscape. Meanwhile a mischievous third presence, Lisa (Bayleigh O’Flynn), runs skittishly in the background, interrupting the others by blasting ‘Crazy in Love’ through the sound system. It’s the first outburst in director Marciana Negrea’s promenade that raises a few confused heads in the crowd.

Against the white industrial interiors of the performance venue, the three figures in their sapphire costumes stand enchanting. However, the space isn’t used as harmoniously in other respects. The natural light coming in from up on high obscures the video projection representing the men of the tale, while voiceovers are sometime inaudible and lost to the acoustics. The use of gesture is unclear and some of the staging decisions are simply baffling. It’s uncertain why one character is suddenly donning a trilby and lighting up a cigarette, and furthermore why she is throwing the hat to me (can I keep this?).

Mostly, we find ourselves lost in the flurry of Muñoz’s descriptions, which strive more for poetry than the solid foundations of narrative construction, for example avoiding the introduction of a new character in the last ten minutes. Frustratingly, we are left adrift.

Traditionally, departures into the magical and pastoral have been made to represent traumas in a way that is not open to the stylistics of typical realism. In Muñoz’s drama, a degeneration of these women’s bodies and minds takes place as a result of the North Pole’s weak atmospheric resistance to the sun’s radiation. Yet the snowy landscape almost seems intended to manifest a deeper trauma about female loneliness and bitterness, something that the play doesn’t quite uncover.

Unfortunately, in lieu of articulating this, the staging makes a final effort to communicate itself by having the actors wade severely through the audience, coldly staring into our eyes. We shouldn’t shy away from provocation in the theatre, especially if it can convey the destructive conditions that have led to an injustice. Yet when we aren’t sure of where the power and pain is coming from, as in Women Among the Ice, provocation is just intimidating. It makes for a frosty conclusion to a play that’s difficult to thaw.

Women Among the Ice played at the Connacht Print Works as part of the Galway Theatre Festival. For more information see the Galway Theatre Festival website. Image by TwitchEye.