Bren is a Dublin security guard. He has a little two-bedroom house that he keeps spotless. He even keeps the toilet roll handy for when he wanks over images on his new computer. His brother Andy is a waster, drawn to drink and violence and worn down by a night shift job he hates but needs to keep his wife and child.
The hopes of the family are on young Kev, a mistake or an afterthought, who has the brains of the clan and a good job as a computer programmer in Galway. But everything falls apart one morning when the brothers are summoned by their father to Bren's house. Their mother, he tells them, is in hospital. But like most things in Gerald Murphy's family drama, appearances can be deceptive.
This is a boy's play. In every sense. It is dominated by the absence of women; there are two missing mothers and wives, one of whom's shadow looms long over the play. Ostensibly, this is a play about the emotional incompetencies of men, the distances they keep between each other, the jealousies and resentments that stop brothers bonding and supporting each other.
Yet it can also be read as a play about bad mothering. These sons and husbands behave appallingly, but it is the unseen women who carry the blame. You are so busy laughing at Murphy's spiky jokes and Lynne Parker's sharp production that you don't necessarily notice this at first, or how reactionary the play is, or how much it resembles so many other male Irish family dramas. I am not saying it isn't enjoyable, just that it is blokes' theatre, and the boys are not all right.
· Until August 28. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
