Daragh Carville's new play for Tinderbox Theatre Company takes place in limbo - fictional, formal, and thematic. Five members of an extended family sit in a static, dull grey environment talking about how they have nothing to talk about. Their fright makeup and teased hair, as well as the dialogue, quickly inform us that they are dead, stuck in a stultifying afterlife. Their bickering has been going on so long that they get caught in loops of action and dialogue, which effectively promote nervous laughter in the audience, as we wonder where this is all leading.
Finally a sixth character emerges: it is the youngest family member, Emer. Like the rest of them, she is as unhappy in death as in life - we find out she died a suicide. Too late in the action, it emerges that there is a possible way out of this Huis Clos scenario, but the reason all but one of the family members find their way out, and where they are heading, remain as unclear as everything else.
Carville has fallen hard between the two stools of specificity and universality: we don't find out enough about the characters to care about their miserable lives, but the larger points he may be making remain vague.
Accents, idiom, and place references locate the play in Ulster, and the suggestion that the characters need to "forget and forgive" and "have peace" tempt us to read the play as a metaphor for Northern Ireland's current socio-political situation - but it is hard to believe that Carville and Tinderbox would buy into such easy cliches.
Michael Duke directs with an admirable sense of control over the limited physical space, and the performers evoke a sense of sadly credible desperation, but this play was dead on arrival.
· On tour until December 3. Details: 028 90439 313.
