How can we live an ethical life? If you have wealth, are your principles always compromised? If you get pleasure from helping others, does that muddy the act of philanthropy? These are big questions and ones that face us daily in this have and have-not world, where millions starve while the rest of us chuck food in the bin. Yet playwright Elizabeth Kuti looks at the present through the prism of the past by setting her latest play amid Dublin's Quaker community in 1850.
Hannah Tewkley and her prosperous husband, Samuel, are upstanding Quakers who strive to live lives so plain that they throw out all the expensive fixtures and fittings in their large house. While Samuel attends to his successful business - importing tea, coffee and sugar - Hannah does good works among the syphilitic prostitutes of the city. One, Martha Ryan, longs to join her sister in America and begs Hannah to give her the fare. Instead Hannah offers to teach Martha to read.
Hannah is also a leading light in the abolitionist campaign, and when Sarah, a freed slave, visits Ireland on a lecture tour, the Tewkleys invite her and the English free-thinker Alfred to stay with them. Soon Hannah is discovering things about her husband and herself that she doesn't want to know. Certainties are turned upside down.
Kuti's drama is a little schematic, but it is shot through with intelligence and an Irish lyricism - although the lyric tendency doesn't always get the slap on the wrist it needs to keep it in check. On the contrary, in Lynne Parker's often ponderous and overwrought production it is given full rein, and even accompanied by a harp. The harp is a mistake, signalling significant moments with all the subtlety of a siren. Still, the play is nicely acted; it makes you question your own charitable impulses and reminds that life isn't black or white, but grey. Maybe with the odd splodge of purple.
· Until February 11. Box office: 0870 429 6883.
