"See, love between a man and a woman, it's private. It happens when you never do see it. In rooms," says Joe. But it is not private in Sebastian Barry's two interweaving monologues, which dissect the fractured marriage of Joe and Janet, whose love for each other echoes their love for their home city, Dublin.
Like so much of Barry's work, this is a memory play in which the protagonists pick away at the scabs of the past - in this case a happy marriage scarred by the death of six-year-old Billy, killed by a lorry in Parnell Street, and an act of senseless violence that took place on the night of Ireland's quarter-final eviction from the 1990 World Cup as Dublin's men turned their disappointment on their wives. "When the Irish team lost, they realised they were losers too."
This is a portrait of reasonably happy lives that take a wrong turn - petty thief Joe loses wife and children, his liberty, his dignity and his health, but saves himself through an act of redemption, though even this is founded on someone else's blood and a miraculously timed arrest. Life's random bricks and bouquets, suggests Barry, can make us or break us. Given that Barry writes in a honeyed prose spiked with a wormwood humour, and the monologues are performed with exquisite restraint by Mary Murray and Karl Sheils, there is hardly a dry eye in the house by the end. But though you would require a heart of stone not to warm to this 100 minutes, there is something lazy about its monologue construction, and if Janet and Joe's story was supposed to have wider implications for modern Irish life, I couldn't fathom it. What it is is very nice, but nice is not quite enough.
· Until September 22. Box office: 020-7328 1000. At Tivoli, Dublin from September 29.
