Ken Harmon's new one-man play kicks up football memories of 1995, when an England-Ireland friendly in Dublin was abandoned because, after the Irish scored, English yobs tore up the terraces and flung them at Irish police. The monologue charts the reaction from a world of rough West Dublin estates. It's a colourful, macho satire in which everyone is endemically criminalised.
Ronan Leahy plays Snorkie, a low-level mad bastard who is generally on the receiving end in life: from his grave-robbing stone-mason boss to his girlfriend Nicola, or indeed her brother Sammy "Duracell", a much-admired local psycho. The play kicks off with a drunken truth game in which Snorkie tells Nicola that he robbed a car - the crime for which the local paramilitaries hospitalised Duracell. So Snorkie's owed a hiding, and the England game only serves as a tension-diffuser.
The hilarity gets black as Snorkie describes the coming together of the local tribes in the pub. The staccato script is pure Dublin baroque, a great thump of contemporary slang. The "smell my middle finger" lad's humour, however, prevents any possible pathos, or much real penetration into the mad sectarianism of Harmon's subject matter.
Leahy's performance is like a controlled explosion. Under Jimmy Fay's direction, he choreographs it like one long martial arts manoeuvre: karate turns and air-punches, the percussive nose-hiss with every head-slap, malignantly searching every face in the auditorium after his more evil utterances.
Until Saturday. Box office: 00 353 1 679 6622.
