The young American playwright Christopher Shinn has soaked up dramatic influences from O'Neill to Mamet. In this ambitious psychological drama - premiered in 2001 - his multiple themes often elude definition, like the static on the TV monitors in Making Strange's stark production.
His isolated characters - the debt-ridden Ed, his ex-girlfriend Dora and his self-loathing twin brother Ty - are trapped by their small-town life, but also by more existential limitations. Meeting Dora (Meg Riordan) on a beach on the edge of town, Ed (Joe Roch) hatches a scheme to break into the shop where she works and steal the takings, but she persuades him to ask Ty for money first. After Ed's suicide, she and Ty (also played by Roch) try to piece together what happened. Drawn together by their loss, they are separated by the difficulty of making sense of their conflicting memories of Ed. As Ty says in a lyrical, if overwritten, interior monologue: desire and truth were pulling against each other.
Resisting the romanticism of the beach setting, designer Deirdre Dwyer's imagery recalls 1980s video games. A green fluorescent grid is projected on to dark bare walls and stage, while the shoreline is visible only on three small TV screens. In this Rubik's Cube setting, director Tom Creed creates a claustrophobic interior world. The self-conscious alienation emphasised by the production diminishes the play's emotional force, despite excellent performances by Roch - in both roles - and the expressive Riordan. A pivotal scene in which Dora and Ty go for a night swim sees them moving awkwardly through the arid space, hampered by a sense of abstraction that renders their drama intriguing rather than gripping.
· Until November 24. Box office: 00 353 1 881 9613.
