My Wife and Me and My Sex Doll Ruby – a tragicomedy that dares to go to dark places while serving up ribald laughs along the way (Sanctuary Theatre until Saturday 11 March)

Every evening Mike (played by Stephen Beggs) comes home from work, his wife Alison (Christine Clark) finds that he’s more and more distant. Out of nowhere he accuses her of now liking conflict, while realising that the delivery of his latest online purchase is going to cause “a bit of a situation”.

The show’s name – My Wife and Me and My Sex Doll Ruby – is a bit of a giveaway as to what is in the half-opened cardboard box, though the audience’s advantage over clueless Alison adds to the early mirth, and the advanced features of the doll are still a bit of a surprise to everyone.

The animated doll’s movements are simplified and stylised and Maryann Maguire delivers Ruby’s speech at a constant rate, though with plenty of intonation, particularly as her situational awareness grows. There’s a raw honesty to how Ruby understands the human world, first demonstrated with the utterance “I have been programmed to be your slave”, a casual assertion that catches even Mike unawares. Reviewing the show on International Women’s Day gave some of Ruby’s dialogue even more salient: “You think if women learn too much they will become dangerous [and they will] take over the world?”

Mike’s satisfaction with his purchase is initially only dampened by his exhaustion. He opens up to his plastic partner about subjects he finds too embarrassing to raise with his wife. Soon he is coaching Ruby to “help make her a woman” while not realising that the doll is having more success than his wife’s “nagging” to persuade him to change away from some of his childish behaviour.

While there’s a lot of raucous and ribald humour to be squeezed out of this threesome’s unexpectedly frank discussions about their particular sexual penchants, the farcical scenes soon rub up against the gradual underlining of Mike’s inner distress, Alison’s patience in the face of degradation, and the potential of Ruby’s technology to perhaps bring about a little good but definitely much ill.

Early on we hear Mike’s perspective of an incident when he was in the bathroom while his wife Alison was showering. Later in the play Alison reveals her version of events. Ruby also gives glimpses into Mike’s poor experiences in work that give more detail than Alison ever garnered from his grumpy conversations when he walked in the front door in the evenings. Disappointingly, these re-understandings felt more significant to me in the audience than they turned out to be for playwright/director Mark Kavanagh in terms of steering the plot, like the seeds of ideas that never came to fruition. A plot thread about childlessness could also have been pulled more tautly.

There’s no rule that says the two halves of a play need to be balanced, though with just shy of three quarters of the action before the interval, Kavanagh is playing with his audience’s bladders and some cuts could be made to quicken Mike and Alison’s descent into the worst recesses of their personalities.

By the end, “why do you humans destroy what you hold so dear?” could have been the big question lingering in audience members’ minds as they left the theatre. Instead, the playwright opts for something more mundane, his take on “it’s good to talk”.

That said, there’s a richness to much the dialogue and development that gives this three-handed play a thrilling sense of not knowing quite how dark the story will dare go, and an insecurity about whether any of the three will make it to the finish with any more self-esteem than they enjoyed at the start.

Clark embodies a whole range of emotions as Alison veers from surprise to disappointment to hope and anger. A potentially violent scene with a toolbox demonstrates how hurt and how far that spurned character might go. Beggs steps into Mike’s oversized suit like a man who has lost his sense of dignity, and teeters on the edge of losing his self-respect along with the tattered remains of his marriage. A stripped back scene in the second act – that’s purely in terms of the set and props rather than the costumes! – delivers a powerful moment as Mike comes to terms with his choices. Clark and Beggs’ wide emotional range is neatly contrasted with Maguire’s need for restraint in her sultry but portrayal of Ruby who rather pleasingly develops her own neuroses by the end of the night.

Mark Kavanagh has written a strong play that successfully investigates the three characters and begins to tease out the ethics of their situation. My Wife and Me and My Sex Doll Ruby continues at the Sanctuary Theatre at 1a Castlereagh Road until Saturday 11 March.

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