Roddy Doyle's novel, from which this play is adapted, plummets the reader into the lively and resilient imagination of Paula Spencer, a working-class Dublin woman who stays with her husband Charlo for 17 years even though he beats her. There is no outside, moralising voice in the book, and it is left to the reader to ask the question: why doesn't she leave him?
This production, adapted by Doyle and Joe O'Byrne and directed by O'Byrne, fails to make this intimate and literary material sit comfortably in the open space of the Helix's 400-seat auditorium. For the story to work, we need to be drawn into Paula's subjectivity; but much of the energy here seems to be focused on reminding us that we are in a theatre.
The first, interminable scene, has Paula babbling across the kitchen table to the Guard who comes to tell her that Charlo has been killed. This does not invite us into the inner life of a troubled woman. Pretty soon there are some straightforward, comic flashbacks of the early days of Paula and Charlo's relationship, but too much of our focus is drawn to how the different settings are evoked - disco, wedding hall, honeymoon bed and breakfast - and we are not given enough information about the nature of Paula's attachment to Charlo.
It is only after the first wife-beating incident (over an hour into the play) that the production hits its stride: the stage is cleared of fussy sets and for the first time Hilda Fay's Paula controls the action. These later scenes suggest that this material would make a good one-woman show, with Fay's ability to communicate both brittleness and vulnerability suited to such a production.
Other members of the cast are underused, particularly the wonderful Brian F O'Byrne, who barely makes an impression as Charlo. Novel and play end with Paula beating Charlo with a frying pan, throwing him out and declaring that she has finally "done something good". In the book, this feels like a victory; in the theatre, the audience didn't seem to know that the play had finished.
· Until May 24. Box office: 00 353 1 700 7000.
