Crestfall is not the kind of small town the Irish Tourist Board has in mind when it suggests that you visit Ireland. For a start, there is a three-eyed dog running around demanding to be fellated, whether by man or woman - it's not fussy. The receptionist at the local hotel welcomes you with his shotgun, and the town is almost entirely populated by whores and pimps, deceitful husbands and vengeful cuckolds.
The writer, Mark O'Rowe, was in the vanguard of Irish storytelling monologues in 1999 with the savagely funny Howie the Rookie; this is another, less focused helping of small-town mythologising, a modern Jacobean revenge tragedy that bleeds poetry and violence. A horse that delivers a brain-damaging kick to a child's head is tortured and trussed in barbed wire; a husband, discovering he is not the father of the son he loves, massacres the future; the sins of the father are washed away in the river. At its centre are three damaged women: the sexually voracious Olive (Pauline Hutton), the sad-eyed prostitute Tilly (Orla Fitzgerald) and the tired Alison (Niamh Cusack), trying to hold together her family with love despite a straying husband and a lost son.
O'Rowe clearly does not worry too much about piling on the stereotypes, and often seems a little too in love with his upside-down syntax to really get down to the storytelling. Despite these flaws, the piece gradually exerts a terrible fascination, as if you were watching a deep root-canal filling being conducted without anaesthetic. It may have less to do with O'Rowe's writing, and more to do with the three quite astonishing actors, who breathe heart and soul into the characters. Long after I've forgotten the words, their ravaged eyes will haunt me.
· Until December 15. Box office: 020-7978 7040.
