Stuart Carolan's first play is set in a Northern Irish border community of extreme Republicans eating themselves alive with suspicion and hatred. IRA heavy JJ is sent down from Belfast to root out a "tout" in the group, and by the end of the play two out of four major characters have been brutally killed before the audience's eyes. Carolan's point clearly seems to be that making one's living through hatred and violence is dehumanising. There are loads of heavy-handed references to drowning puppies, and an emphasis on extreme bad language. He also points to how the culture of sectarian violence relies on romanticisation and role-playing: the play opens with a boy staging a mock-heroic air battle under the kitchen table, and in the course of the action we see what feel like stock characters - the simple farmhand, the hardman father, his conscience-tortured adult son - stage a grown-up, real-life version of this kind of wartime role-play.
On one level the play feels like it's meant to be a thriller in the Gary Mitchell vein, but the revelations don't seem to follow through properly: a day and a read of the script later and I think the big twist was that the farmhand Barney was squealing not to the Brits but to another level up in the Republican hierarchy, but I'm still not sure. Is the fact, then, that we're never really clear what's going on actually Carolan's commentary on how little we, outside the sectarian world, understand how it functions?
Wilson Milam's taut production urges us to take it all very seriously: sounds of circling helicopters get louder and louder, Dick Bird's set of sliding corrugated walls bang into place with scary precision, and an exceptional cast - Tom Hickey, Laurence Kinlan, Frank McCusker and the truly terrifying Gerard McSorley - give it full welly. But this seriousness might well be undermining what is intended ironically; the play and its production seem at odds.
· Until April 24. Box office: 353-1-878-8722.
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