Fergal McElherron is one of Ireland's best young actors and, now, a playwright too. This evening of three short plays shows promise, but is hindered both by occasional overwriting and overcomplicated staging. The audience, split into three groups, moves between separate playing areas, so that each playlet is performed three times.
Under pressure to make the timing work, the first two plays (as I viewed them) suffered from rushed delivery. McElherron's material is quite macabre, and audiences and actors alike could have benefited from a slower entry into these dark, imagined worlds.
The first story sends up the contemporary tabloid culture of sleaze and sensationalism: a teenage brother and sister plot for him to murder her on webcam so that she can become an immortal icon. The characters' detachment from reality is clearly an ironic commentary, but the actors play it with such intense conviction that any potential humour or societal message is lost.
The second play has actor Andy Moore recording a video message in which he reveals how his conflicting love for his girlfriend and desire for children led him to make a shocking choice. Rather like Neil LaBute, whose work is clearly evoked here, McElherron's position on the story he tells is ambiguous: is it meant to imply a larger cultural decay, or is it just juvenile excess?
In the final story, a son nursing his dying mother reveals how his obsessive Catholicism leads him to mistake desecration for beatification. Lalor Roddy and Stella McCusker make this the most involving tale, but again, the tone is off: there are some sharp observations about religious extremism, but the audience didn't feel that it was all right to laugh.
· Until Friday. Box office: 028 90 233 332.
