Paul Mercier's new play - and with it a new Abbey regime - bursts open with a sleek, fresh, inviting energy. Panels on the stage zip apart to reveal the cast of 12 simulating the interior of a plane coming in to land. Brisk dialogue introduces the main character, Jerry Newman, making a brief return to Ireland from "Heaven" (a villa in Italy) to do some consultancy work.
Director/writer Mercier's signature production style has action and actors constantly transforming through quick scene changes. This initially creates a sense of audience disorientation - with Jerry we are whisked to an airport hotel and barraged with information about a mysterious doorman, a "king" who died in a car wash, and increasingly contradictory clues about Jerry's past. A picaresque journey through today's Dublin ensues,encompassing hotels staffed with Eastern Europeans, grungy call shops, drug-ridden housing estates, a squatters' encampment, and a very funny pack of evangelicals.
Loosely based on the Celtic myth of Oisin, the play extends Mercier's favoured theme of the search for values in a changing Ireland: "We used to have an inferiority complex. Now we have an airport complex." But the sense emerges that Mercier has not quite figured out how to draw the plot strands together. A late-emerging subplot about a prostitute looking for her abandoned daughter feels like a last-ditch attempt at a narrative foothold.
Liam Carney compels as Jerry, transmitting a potent combination of charisma and low-level panic, and is well supported by the confident cast and sophisticated production. Mercier, though, has impressions to communicate but not a clear-cut story to tell.
· Until February 18. Box office: 00353 1 878 7222.
