Frank McGuinness's first play is a straightforward narrative about five female manual labourers in a Donegal shirt factory, who take action when their jobs are threatened. The play was first produced in 1982 and is set around the same time. Carol Moore's revival reveals the strength of the play's characterisation, while the unsatisfying ending now feels as historically inevitable as it does dramatically weak.
The short first act sets up the problem: the women, of various ages from teens to 60s, hunch over their work and engage in entertainingly randy banter until the boss-man and the male union representative enter to say that redundancies are on the way. The ringleader, Ellen, hustles her co-workers to her house in the middle of the day. Clearly, she has a plan. When the lights come up on the second act, we find the women, arms full of bedding and bottles of whiskey, holding a defiant blockade in the factory manager's office, which hovers above the main playing area in Sinead O'Hanlon's two-tier set.
McGuinness now has the characters confined in what has become his signature situation: a pressurised setting where personalities are revealed and relationships intensify until they explode. As the bravado that fuelled the women's resistance wears off, and it becomes evident how little support they will receive from male family members, the clergy and the union, they begin to face the question that today's audience asks all along: what can they possibly accomplish?
We now know that the period of economic depression in which McGuinness wrote the play continued until the late 1980s, and even he seems to have sensed that allowing the women to win would ring factually untrue. Instead he celebrates the strength of their spirit for not giving up, but as the actors push their way valiantly through the play's inert final 15 minutes, there is the overwhelming sense that the characters are on a road to nowhere. The fine cast, led by Eleanor Methven as Ellen and impressive newcomer Jo Donnelly as Rebecca, do their best, but the overall feeling is that McGuinness's best was yet to come.
·Until March 2. Box office: 028-9038 1081.
