Having made their name with an unlikely stage miniature - the Fringe First-winning Ladies and Gents, a theatrical film noir set in a public toilet - Semper Fi (Ireland) goes for scale here. However, the company's ambition well outstrips their ability to deliver.
Audiences pile on to buses with blacked-out windows and are driven to a grimy and atmospheric warehouse, where they sit on risers around a big playing space. Young women playing smackheads go-go dance as the rest of the crowd arrives. The play, by Paul Walker, concerns a group of robbers in clown makeup who find a property developer and estate agent in their hideout space and take them hostage.
The problem is that both Walker's script and Karl Shiels' direction are without a clear-cut point of view on a genre - the crime caper gone wrong - which has, by now, been so thoroughly deconstructed by Tarantino, Ritchie, Soderbergh et al, that it's hard to believe that anyone could still imagine it has meat on its bones. The show is billed as an "all-guns-blazing, kick-ass homage to the 70s", and this may be where the trouble started: the starting point was apparently not 1970s films but the fuzzy concept of the decade itself (programme notes mention Patty Hearst, Nixon, the oil crisis and mood rings).
As they watch stupid criminals bickering over who makes the tea, cutting off a woman's finger and turning against each other, audiences will struggle to determine whether this production is wilfully ignoring or trying to parody contemporary crime movies. There is little sense of mood, tone or pace. The combat scenes - kung-fu fights and shoot-'em-ups with real guns - are particularly cringe-worthy: with the audience on all sides, the action was never going to be credible, but the actors play it seriously, which only makes them look foolish. This whole show's firing blanks.
· Until October 1. Box office: 00 353 1 677 8511.
