Hot from the Edinburgh Fringe, Conall Morrison's one-man play for Dublin's Storytellers Company seeks to explore the political, religious and sexual contradictions of Northern Irish life. It's vividly written and virtuosically performed by Séan Kearns - but there are times when you feel Morrison is like a man trying to cram the contents of an entire wardrobe into a single suitcase.
The simile is apt because the stage is littered with old clothes, the contents of a Belfast family attic to which John Foster, a one-time dirty tricks specialist with the British security forces, has returned. As he surveys the detritus of his past, Foster dons the garb of his ancestors and transforms into his grandfather, who was a firebrand Protestant lay preacher, and then his print-frocked mother, a devout Catholic. Although passionately rejecting his mixed religious inheritance, Foster seems inescapably shaped by it.
This, to me, is the play's problem: Morrison never forges a direct link between Foster's muddied spiritual background and his role as a counterintelligence officer. Where the play scores is in its re-creation of Foster's murky professional activities: he turned a stray dog into a nationally admired military mascot, supervised the use of laundry vans as surveillance spy-holes and "ran" a double-agent who turned on his operator, with lethal results.
Morrison gets a superb performance from Kearns, a tall, angst-ridden figure who, in his feverish ransacking of the past and constant donning of ancestral clothes, seems a restless man in search of an identity. Even if the character is too much of a special case to become a national metaphor, you end up awed by Kearns's performance.
· Until September 26. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
