Real Dublin placenames punctuate Mark O'Rowe's new odyssey through the city, but there are few other anchors to the everyday. The break from realism made by his last play, Crestfall, into a bleak imaginative realm is deepened here as his three characters' nocturnal wanderings are given a metaphysical twist, echoing ancient epics and fairytales.
Unfolding in a series of monologues, each character recounts the extraordinary events of a single night, their stories overlapping, then finally converging. A mother seeking atonement who is driven to violent vengeance (Andrea Irvine), a young woman looking for love (Eileen Walsh), and a man on a killing spree who has sold his soul to the devil (Aidan Kelly) are connected in ways that emerge from their rhyming soliloquies, with an emotional undertow that is new for O'Rowe. Dense, lyrical language with bursts of black humour eases us through the sometimes horrific violence described, as the rhythms build to a series of climaxes. Of these, Walsh's litany of her life's most intense experiences, recited at the point of death, is the most eloquent and powerful - so much so, in fact, that it feels like a culmination.
Directed by O'Rowe himself, the three riveting performers remain on stage throughout. Rooted to the ground while speaking, they are lit by Philip Gladwell's long horizontal beams, crisscrossing Jon Bausor's black abstract space like searchlights.
The intricacy and formality of O'Rowe's narrative structure, with the mother and daughter's story doubling back on itself, work against a sense of dramatic climax in performance, so the piece seems to fall away quietly rather than conclude. Like his characters' leap into a fantastical world of flying demons and angels, O'Rowe is expanding his language and dramatic form as far as they can go. But wherever he's headed, for this dazzling writer the terminus is nowhere in sight.
· Until July 7. Box office: 003531 8787222.
