This is the first professional Irish production of ...touched..., which features three young actors, each spotlit in turn. They tell a frantic and, at the start, not totally clear story of an encounter in a Dublin hostel on New Year's Eve, 1999. In the next hour we find out what happened long before and immediately after: brother and sister Cora and Mikey live by the Cork seaside, where she is repeatedly sexually abused by the local doctor. As teenagers, they eventually take their revenge: they escape to the big city and end up robbing a shop. The third actor plays both the paedophile doctor and a Dublin wide boy, Macca, who tries to sell the story of his encounter with Cora and Mikey to the police.
An amateur Cork company made a big splash at the 1999 Edinburgh fringe with this play, here staged by Asylum Productions and the Cork midsummer festival. In the meantime, the piece has been translated into eight languages and its writer, Ursula Rani Sarma, is developing work for theatres including the National, the Traverse, the Abbey, Cork Opera House and Paines Plough.
There is talent in her writing: the storytelling is complex but clear, and the language is vibrant and imaginative. Both play and production, however, have a studenty feel. As a complete piece of theatre, this does not sit well outside the hothouse context of a fringe festival. There is an enormous amount of information and action packed into a short running time - sexual abuse, murder, street crime - and I found myself wishing for a more thorough examination of the personal and social contexts for the action, and a better integration of Macca into the story. Despite three terrific performances, there is a threadbare feeling to Donal Gallagher's staging: ill-fitting costumes, awkward lighting cues, oppressive sound design.
We wait expectantly for this celebrated young writer's talents to be displayed and tested in a full-length, major professional production.
· At the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast, from June 9 to June 12. Box office: 028-9023 3332. Then touring.
